[Talk-us] Edits near Lexington, KY?

[Steven Johnson]

Serge & all,

You're referring to Randy Hale's presentation at the 2010 SotM-US, which
was a case study of his collaboration with a Chattanooga-area school.[1]
The presentation makes mention of the 'Great Pub & Brothel War of 2010',
but IIRC most of the details of that war were in the soundtrack to the
presentation. Maybe Randy can chime in with more about how they remedied
that.

Assuming the Lexington edits were made as part of a classroom exercise, I'd
guess that the instructors lacked a well-defined rubric for assessing
student contributions. In GWU's program, instructors Nuala Cowan & Richard
Hinton are using Overpass Turbo as a tool for insuring features are tagged
properly, linear features are connected, and areas are closed. This is all
documented in Step 5 of the sample workflow on TeachOSM.org.[2]

If anyone on the list is involved with using OSM in education, directly or
indirectly, we'd welcome feedback on the TeachOSM workflow, as well as case
studies on how you assess data quality of student contributions.

Thanks for raising the issue.


[1] http://northrivergeographic.com/documents/OpenStreetMap_in_Education.ppt
[2] http://teachosm.org/en/workflow/workflow5/

-- SEJ
-- twitter: @geomantic
-- skype: sejohnson8

There are two types of people in the world. Those that can extrapolate from
incomplete data.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 7:25 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Shawn,
>
> My memory is fuzzy but there was a HS class that incorporated OSM in
> the curriculum in around 2009/2010.
>
> It was discussed at the first SOTM US in Atlanta.
>
> There were a number of issues with the instructional effort on all
> sides of the equation. For the school, they felt our tagging
> system/editor was offensive because it included features that
> conflicted with local morals and laws (brothels, for example). For
> teachers, the teaching material was thin. For the OSM community, as
> you pointed out, the students engaged in what we'd consider vandalism
> (tagging each others' homes as bars and brothels) and I'm guessing
> that you're seeing more of that kind of vandalism.
>
> Using OSM in an educational setting is a laudable goal. It teaches
> kids not kids not just the material but lets them work on something
> "that really matters". It teaches them to be part of a larger
> community and work within that community. It also hopefully teaches
> them the value of the kind of work we're doing, our ethos of Free Data
> and collaboration, etc.
>
> At the same time, as you've seen, unless this is done carefully, it
> can be a real problem. In OSM we've seen classes using OSM doing mass
> imports, for example. We've seen these kind of edits that we'd
> normally classify as vandalism, etc.
>
> The Wikipedians see something similar when they work in schools, and
> this issue of quality is always an issue.
>
> As we see OSM used more in education, we have to really make the
> instructors aware of the issues and make sure that monitoring the
> student edits for quality is part of their workflow, both in terms of
> instruction/grading but also in terms of ensuring that the OSM data
> remains of high value.
>
> - Serge
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 7:04 AM, Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com>
> wrote:
> > Does anyone know anything about a school course (middle or high school
> > most likely) incorporating OSM in or near Lexington, KY? I saw one
> > changeset comment mentioning something about extra credit but not
> > mentioning what the edit actually was. In addition I cleaned up plenty
> > of vandalism: a road on top of another road labeled "Short cut to
> > school", three exclamation marks added to a street name, undeleted a
> > fire hydrant (!), and a couple of other things that I'm drawing a blank
> > on right now.
> >
> > While I support OSM-related lessons in the classroom on general
> > principle, but I have to wonder if some of the garbage edits that come
> > with it offset the good edits. And to put it bluntly, the higher the
> > grade level this is coming from, the more disappointed I will be
> > regarding our public education system in 2014.
> >
> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=13/38.0462/-84.4885
> >
> > --
> > Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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>
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