The 8th edition of UNIGIS studies in Kraków, Poland.

Last weekend students of intake 2011 took part in the introductory UNIGIS workshop in Kraków. In such a way the eighth edition of postgraduate studies in Geographic Information Science & Systems started at the Jagiellonian University - the UNIGIS centre in Poland.

Two years of distance learning is quite challenging, therefore the workshop was focused on giving students the best possible start into their adventure with UNIGIS. They were involved in a couple of acivities, which were supposed to establish a good communication basis among themselves and with the UNIGIS Kraków team. Some organizational and technical introductions were essential as well.

Students of intake 2011 are highly motivated to achieve their goal - becoming members of the UNIGIS alumni community. Good luck!

UNIGIS in Nepal: on track towards launch!

The UNIGIS orientation workshop organised in Kathmandu 'is a further step towards establishing a UNIGIS study centre in Nepal', said Dr. Shahnawaz (Director South & Southeast Asia, UNIGIS International). He elaborated that this collaboration was initiated already in 2010, but the granting of formal permission from the Ministry of Education can only be facilitated by the new incoming Nepalese Government. Now this process is expected to complete within the next weeks. Anticipating a favourable outcome, a faculty orientation workshop was conducted at the partner institution Kathmandu Forestry College (KAFCOL: www.kafcol.edu.np) on 5^th February, 2011. 15 highly motivated individuals attended, including Dr. Bishnu Hari Pandit (Principal KAFCOL), Dr. Krishna Prasad Poudel (Coordinator, UNIGIS at KAFCOL), members of the academic board, other faculty members as well as some potential course participants.

KAFCOL, which is a college affiliated with Tribhuvan University, will offer UNIGIS qualifications under a joint study programme with the Centre for Geoinformatics (Z_GIS: www.uni-salzburg.at/zgis), University of Salzburg, Austria.

52 new students georeferenced at UNIGIS Salzburg

Today, a total of 52 new students in the UNIGIS MSc and UNIGISprofessional certificate programmes finished their introductory orientation workshops at the University of Salzburg. Since intensive communication, mutual support and working in virtually connected groups is absolutely essential for success in a distance learning program, getting to know each other well is one key objective during these kick-off workshops.

The agenda kept everybody busy with exploring one's own motivation and curricular options, working through individual SWOT analyses and elective GIS software options, as well as establishing Web 2.0 communications and exploring the benefits of an ePortfolio.

Students from a wide variety of backgrounds including Cartography, Planning, Biology, Archeology, IT, Environmental Studies, Forestry, Geography and many others joined in their common objective to enhance their professional qualifications and careers with on emphasis on Geoinformatics, leveraging Geospatial Science and Technologies to tackle their mission and tasks from an explicit spatial perspective.

While spatial is not any more special, 'geospatial' today is even more important to provide universal 'context' for our lives and personal roles in our environments, societies and professions.