Person: Schweik, Charles
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Professor, Dept of Environmental Conservation and School of Public Policy and Administration
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Schweik
First Name
Charles
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Demography, Population, and Ecology
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
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For information about me, please visit CharlieSchweik.org.
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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
Publication Introduction to Geographic Information Systems for Natural Resources Management(2011-01-01) Schweik, Charles MA lab exercise manual used in an Introduction to Geographic Information Systems class designed for undergraduates or graduate students. Material takes students though the fundamentals using ArcGIS v10.Publication FOSS4G 2017 Full Conference Proceedings (papers and posters)Schweik, Charles M; Zia, Mohammed; Anderson, AndyThis Conference Proceedings is a collection of outstanding papers and posters submitted to the Academic Program of the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), 14th to 19th August 2017 in Boston, U.S.A.Publication World Librarians: A Peer-to-Peer Commons for Closing the Global Digital Divide(2018-01-01) Smith, Jeremy; Schweik, Charlie; Meyer, CarlINTRODUCTION An estimated 53% of the world’s population do not have Internet access. As a consequence, they lack information capital that could be key to bettering their lives. In this practice article, we introduce a sociotechnical system called “World Librarians.” This system, facilitated by a knowledge commons, provides educators, librarians, students, and medical professionals in remote Internet-poor areas of Malawi with access to digital content that they request. OBJECTIVE We describe the social and technical methods by which a team of educators, librarians, students, and information technology specialists in information-privileged environments share educational content to information-disadvantaged communities. METHODS After briefly discussing key foundational components and partnerships, we explain the mechanics of the sociotechnical system. We follow this with two proof-of-concept cases where offline requesters in remote school and library contexts in rural Malawi are assisted by an online librarian searcher team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. RESULTS The proof of concept cases demonstrate that the relatively low-cost sociotechnical system accomplishes the goal of sharing open access educational content in remote areas with limited or no access to networked information. Moreover, the cases demonstrate that the content shared can be content global southerners offline want and need, rather than information global northerners think they should have. CONCLUSIONS The World Librarians system is ready to be scaled and replicated at other institutions with ready access to high-speed networked information. The authors welcome contact from readers who might be interested in establishing their library as a new “searcher node” in the growing World Librarians network.Publication Volume Introduction LetterSchweik, Charles M; Zia, Mohammed; Anderson, AndyThis Conference Proceedings is a collection of outstanding papers and posters submitted to the Academic Program of the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), 14th to 19th August 2017 in Boston, U.S.A.Publication Reflections of an Online Geographic Information Systems Course Based on Open Source Software(2007-10-03) Schweik, Charles M.; Fernandez, Maria; Hamel, Michael P.; Kashwan, Prakash; Lewis, Quentin; Stepanov, AlexanderThis SSCORE report summarizes our experience offering an online introductory course on Geographic Information Systems that utilizes available free/libre and open source software (FOSS). Two primary objectives were to (1) reach students in developing countries, and (2) to help move forward the development of an “open content” GIS curriculum as part of the “Open Source Geospatial Foundation” (OSGeo.org) educational effort. Course design, key software (QGIS, GRASS, PostGresql/PostGIS) and online delivery methods are described. Results and factors leading to a low course completion rate and discussed. Contributing factors include: (1) a for-credit versus no-credit decision; and (2) technical issues. Recommendations for others considering online offerings and for the OSGeo educational effort are provided.Publication Lights, Camera...Citizen Science: Assessing the Effectiveness of Smartphone-based Video Training in Invasive Plant Identification dataset(2014-01-01) Starr, Jared; Schweik, Charles M; Bush, Nathan; Fletcher, Lena; Finn, John T; Fish, Jennifer; Bargeron, Charles T.The rapid growth and increasing popularity of smartphone technology is putting sophisticated data-collection tools in the hands of more and more citizens. This has exciting implications for the expanding field of citizen science. With smartphone-based applications (apps), it is now increasingly practical to remotely acquire high quality citizen-submitted data at a fraction of the cost of a traditional study. Yet, one impediment to citizen science projects is the question of how to train participants. The traditional “in-person” training model, while effective, can be cost prohibitive as the spatial scale of a project increases. To explore possible solutions, we analyze three training models: 1) in-person, 2) app-based video, and 3) app-based text/images in the context of invasive plant identification in Massachusetts. Encouragingly, we find that participants who received video training were as successful at invasive plant identification as those trained in-person, while those receiving just text/images were less successful. This finding has implications for a variety of citizen science projects that need alternative methods to effectively train participants when in-person training is impractical. This file is the raw data that accompanies the PLoS article.