This website contains resources for the Libre Geo project, a collection of geographic information science and technology (GIS&T) course materials. Libre Geo’s focus is on in-class activities, out-of-class exercises, and interactive classroom instruction.
Libre Geo is not meant to be a “drag-and-drop” textbook for a single GIS&T
course. Rather, it is meant to be a comprehensive repository of many different
teaching resources. The best approach is determine which concepts you would like
to teach and extract select resources geared to those concepts. Libre Geo takes
a “building block” approach, partly inspired by the (completely unrelated)
status bars of tiling window managers like libqtile.bar
and i3-blocks
: You
choose which elements work for you, modify them to your liking, and quickly
incorporate them into your teaching.
The Libre Geo project is motivated by GIS educators who:
The project is organized as follows: topics are listed on the left-hand navigation pane. Topics contain subtopics, and within those are various types of resources, called “modules”: (a) short activities, (b) tutorials, (c) and in-depth exercises.
Instructors can use these resources in several different ways. These are organized in descending order from most basic (and simplest to implement) to most fully featured (though more complex).
Method A: Informally graze this website and incorporate the ideas into your coursework as desired. This approach is self-explanatory.
Method B: Download a .zip
of the GitLab
repository, copy various .Rmd
files from the
GitLab repository, and work them into
your own course materials.
Method C: Fork the GitLab repository
https://gitlab.com/mhaffner/libre-geo
, make changes and modifications as
desired, and deploy your version of the repository using GitLab pages. Ideally,
we’d like to have your changes and contributions back! Currently, the collection
of resources in Libre Geo is being deployed using this method.
As a collaborative project, contributions are highly encouraged but certainly not obligatory. Procedures on contributing a module (or simply improving the website) can be found here.