Jim O’Leary will be offering a pair of courses on MapGuide Open Source at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) this fall. Jim is an experienced educator, and has been actively promoting open source geospatial and neogeography in the Vancouver PHP community.
In the first three-day session, Jim covers all of the MapGuide basics in a format that doesn’t require any programming knowledge. In the second session, he moves deeper into the MapGuide APIs and also shows how to work with other popular GIS components such as PostGIS, Oracle, and Google Earth.
I am not surprised that BCIT is offering this course. One of the smartest folks I have ever worked with–Rob Hewlett–is an instructor there. Also, a couple years ago my employer took on a practicum student–Colin Robertson–who developed a full web map during his short term. BCIT has the technological chops to realize how important this kind of content is.
I hope that this is just the tip of the iceberg, as educational institutions begin to understand that they can provide real value to their students (and the students’ potential employers) by introducing them to open source geospatial technologies.
-J
P.S. note to self: try not to forget about BCIT’s deadline for practicum placements AGAIN this year
Yeah, BCIT is a top-notch place and Rob is a good instructor (especially when you are able to ask him homework Q’s one-on-one…)
This course would be great for those org’s looking to implement a GIS solution to their open-source needs. Unfortunately, how many places are going to go for it? BCIT’s full-time GIS program is so focussed on the ESRI suite of products that unless you are a student specifically interested in pursuing this line of GIS work, most are going to chalk it up to one more course that they’ll hardly (most likely, never) ever need in the “real-world”.
Great blog BTW… I’m always interested in what you are posting!
Thanks Carlos.
Job applicants who can press the buttons are a dime a dozen. I’m hoping that students will recognise that they need to differentiate themselves from their cohort, to show that they are flexible enough and have enough initiative to investigate new technologies.
While large employers may remain bastions of proprietary technology for a while yet, it will be difficult for smaller organisations to dismiss the commoditisation of geospatial server technology. Even the provincial government (a huge ESRI customer) is already using PostGIS and MapServer for some of their functionality. Why would anyone want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for software, when they can get the 80% sweet-spot functionality for free and not have to worry about additional costs as their usage scales?
I am a long-time proprietary GIS user and willingly concede that ESRI’s desktop software is still best-of-breed for hard-core GIS (though some are starting to catch up). I also argue that open source geospatial should be part of any cost/benefit analysis for server-side technology.
Jason
Glad I found your blog. Jim’s a great guy and an excellent instructor. We joke about the fact that as technical as I am, I couldn’t get my feet wet in PHP programming until I took his class at Langara! I still have the final project I did for his class on my website. He makes difficult subjects make sense; I use his example when I explain variables and arrays to people.
I think that the most frustrating part about getting out of BCIT and into the real world was that BCIT was great for understanding the breadth and knowledge about GIS technologies overall. But most employers end up hiring BCIT grads as “push-the-buttons” techies; learning all that ESRI stuff like ArcObjects, ArcEngine, SDE pigeon-holes the grads into jobs and employers where that’s the major software package of choice.
The program should allow for a ESRI stream of courses and a Autodesk stream. The one downside to the program is that they don’t include AutoCAD in the course list for full-timers! You have to go and do it on your own ($$$). I don’t think a lot of students (esp the ones getting out of university) know that. A lot of GIS departments in the city governments use AutoCAD and Autodesk’s GIS products because the engineers use it for drafting major infrastructure (i.e. Roads, sewers, pipes, sidewalks etc).
Anyway, I could go on and on with other observations about the program and employability afterwards. It is a good program overall and I can’t complain about my employment opportunities after graduating.
As for getting a student next year, don’t be surprised if a lot of them are looking for practicums instead of projects. From what I heard, a lot of the students in the past few years end up going for end-of-the-year practicums, mostly because employers would keep them on for summer (good experience esp for those that didn’t have any GIS work experience). It also freed up a few days in the week for homework.
Don’t know what you guys do but I ended up doing a project a few years back with Brian Goble at the CVRD in Duncan. Great project setup – we bounced a few ideas around at an initial meeting, he gave me some SDE data to play with and I tailored a ArcMap project with some code as part of my BCIT project. While most of my classmates had to wait until mid-June to finish their projects, myself and few others had an instructor helping us on Thrusday and Fridays until the May long weekend. When Brian had been in the program 6 years ago, everyone had to do a project. Now a lot of them want to do practicums instead (not realizing that they could tons of help at BCIT and finish early….!)
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents ;) Good luck with your student and don’t forget to call Rob in mid-Sept!
Tony, thanks for the comments.
Carlos, interesting that you worked with Brian. I’m in touch with him fairly often about the central island 911 base.
I really think that offering students a single-technology stream is doing them a disservice. When I look at resumes, I would much rather see both education and experience in multiple software packages / vendors. Flexibility and willingness to learn are far more important than expertise in any one application.
Jason, it’s good to hear that you would look at someone with multiple software packages/vendors. Because a lot of other places/jobs/short-term contracts don’t. That was my feeling when I was applying for jobs 1.5 years ago. I get the sense from your blog that your workplace allows for some creative time on new GIS tools & technologies.
There was a lot of interviews back then but I could almost feel the rejection once I explained that I had a lot education in different technologies (ArcIMS, ArcEngine, Microstation, etc,) but only did my project in ArcObjects customization.
Even now, I would love to build on my ArcSDE/Oracle/SQL training, but that’s next to impossible in without access to the technology. Given the importance of databases in the industry, there’s only a few of us grads at BCIT (in my year) that are still using any of our SQL skills and even then its in Access.
Dig what I’m saying man? ;)
Cheers
CS
Jason, Mike Schramm from Autodesk here. Thanks for highlighting what BCIT is doing with MapGuide.
I expect engineering and geoscience students and faculty interested in GIS may want to know about Autodesk’s Student Engineering and Design community. Autodesk has a site geared at offering students and faculty access to our 3D design software, which now includes AutoCAD Map 3D 2008 and Autodesk Raster Design 2008. There is also a host of training materials, including e-learning, all free to students and faculty who register at http://students.autodesk.com.
Best, Mike