The real Living Map

What are they doing here?

As you might know there are three different kinds of networks: professional networks, personal networks and Triangular Irregular Networks. This weekend a new group of UNIGIS professional students were heavily engaged in building all kinds of networks in order to set a good starting point for a year of collaborative learning. Read the complete story...

Future GIS Professionals Meeting in Salzburg

Professor Strobl and the UNIGIS Professional team had the pleasure to welcome future GIS professionals in Salzburg last weekend. The highly motivated group gathered primarily to get to know each other and the UNIGIS team, but also to get in touch with the study materials and to learn about the various opportunities for specialisation in their UNIGIS professional study program.

Once again it became obvious that GIS skills are required in a vast number of disciplines. The diversity of domains that were represented in the introductory workshop was large: from GIS professionals in a military context to urbanists and from IT developers to public administration. But irrespectively of these differences all participants quickly identified a common ground: the geographical coordinate and the spatial perspective on the respective domain. This is exactly where UNIGIS comes in: we teach generic GIS methods, concepts and tool skills, which are then further developed by the participants for their specific needs in their professional environment.
Currently the new students set up their personal learning and software environment and make their first steps in the introductory module. But we are confident that within a few weeks they become active members in the growing UNIGIS community!

UNIGIS professional Workshop: Replacing Question Marks

Who are those people running UNIGIS? 
Who will be my colleagues? 
What are their reasons to acquire in depth GI-knowledge and skills? 
How will the study-year to come be organized? 
What can I do to get the most out of it? 
Was it a wise decision to invest a considerable amount of time and money into this endeavor?

 
Questions like these our 16 new UNIGIS professional students might have had in mind, when traveling to the introductory UNIGIS professional workshop taking place in Salzburg last weekend. Although predominantly very positive answers from our graduates to the last question are promising, individual answers will require a personal long term retrospective. Apart from that, we are confident that the workshop provided enough opportunities to remove most of the remaining question marks and replace them by an overall positive outlook towards the intensive period of learning ahead!

West is up? Nevermind!

Meeting for an introductory workshop in Salzburg last weekend, our new UNIGIS professional students were already perfectly working together making THEIR map. It consists of 23 (quite active and human ;-) ) symbols, representing 23 home locations between Kiel and Klagenfurt and between Bern and Vienna.

"Collective mapping"

While one might argue this map fails to meet several cartographic conventions including correct orientation, we would reply that map orientation does not matter at all, as long as they got good orientation for the intensive year of UNIGIS-studies to come. All the best to you for this challenging endeavour!

Start learning the language of space!

No matter if you develop agrarian insurance products, maintain facility networks, provide data for community planning or do research on golden eagles: space matters.

The real world doesn’t happen on a needles tip. It requires physical space. Space not as a kind of arbitrary shoebox, it is the spatial configuration of things that often plays the key role: Real world processes require a certain form of coincidence, adjacency, nearness, connectedness or other form of spatial relationship between their elements to work out fine or happen at all.  Maps can help to understand those processes in their spatial and chronological dimension, computers can be used to model and simulate them in a digital sandbox, representing the real world.

However, before we can do so and use the respective results to make better decisions, we need to learn.  Not just about GI-software and data but also about the language of space. A group of 15 future GI-professionals will extensively do so within a year from now and already made a start at their introductory workshop in Salzburg. The first geospatial insights came cloud-based and shed a light on the spatial properties of the group itself. Who might be easy to reach partners to establish a local learning group? Is it possible to define my spatial neighbors and if yes, who are they? Also the question of centrality was discussed. However, centrality within a student group doing distance learning is probably better expressed in non-spatial terms: Sometimes communication matters as well.

UNIGIS professionals @ work

This weekend a group of 16 professionals from various disciplines got together in Salzburg to participate in an introductory workshop of the UNIGIS professional certificate distance learning program in Geoinformatics.

...Wait a minute, did you say WORKshop? Look at the pictures!

Hm, yes, there was work done, but the pictures illustrate the probably most important part of this event: Getting to know each other to go together into a year of intensive learning, requiring discussion and mutual support!

Starting in Salzburg, 18 (future) GI-professionals will make their way!

Last weekend was a perfect start. A start not just into a year of demanding coursework, but also a start to advance careers by acquiring a comprehensive set of skills and competences in applied Geoinformatics.  After finishing their UNIGIS professional studies, our new group of 18 committed people with backgrounds in Archeology, Botany, Geography, Geology, Ecology, Forestry, Landscape Architecture and Surveying will be able to make out more of their spatial data. 

They all  will know how to use of GIS and related technologies to acquire, model, distribute and analyze geolocated data, how to derive meaningful information from it and how to communicate this information to others by means of clear and easy to understand maps and visualizations. Since spatial is special, having competence in “spatial” is special in the job market as well. A look into the careers of numerous UNIGIS alumni provides proof enough. We from the UNIGIS Salzburg team will try our best to support our new students along their individual learning paths and wish a successful year of study!

Once again: UNIGIS professional attracts practitioners from near and far.

After a very successful last year in terms of student registrations for the UNIGIS professional certificate in Salzburg, the popularity of this application-oriented GIS study program offered by the Centre of Geoinformatics is continuing in 2012.

Most of this year's first group of students attended the introductory workshop a few days ago to 'dive into' an innovative and partly unfamiliar learning environment, and getting to know fellow students and UNIGIS faculty.

The broad range of participants' background domains  indicate the integrative character of spatial information science. Beyond that, a stimulating atmosphere for collaborative learning not only for students, but for the entireUNIGIS community is created by this variety.

Besides this range of domain-specific experience, the geographical distribution of students is remarkable. With participants coming from the very North of Germany as well as from South Tyrol, the Vienna region and Switzerland, the value of a study program exclusively taught online is being successfully demonstrated.


P.S.: The next UNIGIS professional study group starts in May 2012.