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Abstract
We are the Geospatial Information Systems Club from Texas A&M University - Commerce in Commerce, TX. Over the past year, we have cultivated an incredible community of researchers, data analysts, programmers, and writers to make our club one of the top academic clubs on our campus. Our first project even won a first place award. How did we do it? We used Foss4G software. As beginners, we came together as a community of close friends, learned QGIS and undertook a project that highlighted and celebrated the rich 125 year history of our university. Together we continue to use QGIS to study such topics as gentrification, education scarcity, cattle migration, movement of our alumni over time, and many others. We take a different educational approach to learning. Rather than setting tight deadlines for large projects, we come together, we collaborate to solve problems. In addition to our use of QGIS, we have developed our own open source software, and we only use open source software when completing our projects. We want to show how learning GIS looks outside of the classroom, and how beneficial the community of problem solvers we've created has been to our university.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/R5HD7SVQ
Recommended Citation
Beare, Ryan; Goti, Vidhi; and Trojacek, Seth
(2017)
"Open Source and Open Learning,"
Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings: Vol. 17, Article 24.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/R5HD7SVQ
Available at:
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/foss4g/vol17/iss1/24