Lex Berman from Harvard just dropped me a nice email with a link to an interactive QGIS tutorial he has created. The tutorial is one of the nicest I have seen – each section is detailed with text, screenshots and howto videos. I thought I would make a quick post about it here so the rest of the world can enjoy it too!
Lex's cool online tutorial (click to visit the site)
I quite often get requests for my training materials and learning materials for FOSSGIS in general. Last week I was sent an email from The University of Nottingham, UK, who have been setting up a portal to collate FOSS GIS learning resources. The portal is here http://elogeo.nottingham.ac.uk/xmlui/ I haven’t gone through the portal in depth, but my quick scan through it looks like it has some interesting and useful resources.
ELOGeo Website
I just got back from another week away, training people to use QGIS in Tanzania. There are few things more rewarding in life for a QGIS developer that looking out over a class of 30 trainees new to GIS (and QGIS) eagerly absorbing everything you have got to show them about your favourite FOSS GIS. This was my second time running a training course in Dar Es Salaam and my third visit to Tanzania. What is really nice is that two of the attendees from the previous course I ran (Dr. Edward Kohi and Fadhili Bwagalilo) acted as training assistants this time around. It was nice on two counts. Firstly, the fact that they are now comfortable in a mentoring role for other users shows that the last training course was successful. Secondly, it was really great to have their help – anyone who has ever tried to train 30 demanding people in a computer lab for three days solid will attest to how tiring it is and how valuable it is to have roaming helpers in the room to absorb some of the queries that one gets bombarded with. Thanks Edward and Fadhili!
Hulda Gideon (TanBIF representitive), training assistant Fadhili Bwagalilo, myself and Dr. Edward Kohi (training assistant). (Click for larger image)
During the course we covered basic concepts of GIS, basic usage of QGIS and introduced the openModellerPlugins for QGIS that we wrote under contract to GBIF / TanBIF last year. Needless to say I also gave my introductory lecture on how wonderful the concept of Free Software and how bad proprietary software is. The latter really resonates with audiences in developing nations. The costs of proprietary software leave many intellectually out in the cold. The ability to share FOSS GIS software freely and learn on an open system offers a real leg up in the world to someone who would otherwise be struggling to solve complex problems with an extremly limited set of tools.
A class full of QGIS converts! (click for full size image)
I really look forward to doing further work in Tanzania and other African countries in the future. If anyone has need of my services in their country, please feel free to contact me. In the future I hope to hold some training workshops for previous course attendees with the idea of introducing more advanced concepts and getting their knowledge to the point where they are comfortable conducting their own training sessions. With this model, before we know it every little village in Africa that has a computer could be putting QGIS to good use to solving problems that have a spatial twist to them! A big thanks to my hosts COSTECH and TanBIF, and personally to Hulda Gideon for working all the behind the scenes magic! I leave you with something to ponder while you sit in your airconditioned office in some cold place….
Another beautiful sunset over the ocean near Dar Es Salaam...
Here is the first in a (neverending?) series of screencasts I plan to make showing you how to do common tasks in FOSSGIS and QGIS. If you have requests for further tutorials let me know what you are looking for in the comments below. Enjoy!
Note:Just an update from Martin Dobias (author of the functionality I have demonstrated in the above video) that you don’t need to be using trunk to do what I demonstrate in the video 1.5 or 1.6 should work fine too. See comments below. Thanks Martin!
This week we (Gavin Fleming, Sam Lee Pan and myself) are doing more training – a week of QGIS and PostGIS. Its a small group this time and they have GIS knowledge already so we get to go much deeper into the nuts & bolts of QGIS than I normally would do on a course (which is a real pleasure for me). Our attendees are a mix of people from industry, government and students – and we have one attendee from Botswana!
Also very interesting is the venue we are using to run the course in. AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) is situated a stone’s throw from the popular Muizenberg beach, Cape Town. Now this (AIMS) is one awesome place. When you walk in the door there is a statue of Steven Hawking who paid a visit to the center. And the place is brimming with maths students from all over Africa. They are all on fully paid up scholarships to attend a residential diploma course in mathematics which will prepare them to go on to do masters and Phd courses in maths. So they get a room, full board and access to top notch tutors and leave with excellent skills and a network of friends around Africa with whom they can collaborate in future years. The best part is that the whole center runs on Linux. They have labs full of ubuntu machines where they beat out complicated formulas using SAGE and make python jump through mathematical hoops.
Now the funny thing is that I have been dreaming for the last few years of having just such a center for FOSSGIS – where people from all over Africa can come and do a residential course in using and programming FOSSGIS. So it was with fascination, pleasure and yes, a little bit of envy that I was taken around the AIMS facilities. One day hopefully someone with an unbelievable fortune and no idea what to do with it will see this blog post and contact me so that we can start AIFS (African Institute for FOSSGIS Studies) 
. We are really grateful to AIMS for hosting us this week in their excellent facility, and showing us what a little foresight and ingenuity can achieve.
I’ll leave you with a couple of pics of our course attendees doing their thing…
Things have been busy – I just back from training course in Tanzania, and last week I was giving a lecture and practical at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Lecturer Kevin Musungu from the Civil Engineering and Surveying Department at Cape Technikon asked us to give a presentation on open source GIS after meeting Tim at the QGIS workshop earlier this year. We were happy to introduce them to open source GIS and QGIS as they had currently had no exposure to this side and relied heavily on propriety GIS software. The Head of Department also came to sit in the lecture and had some good questions regarding open source as an alternative.
The class were third-year BTech surveying students that were doing a course in GIS. Some of them are already involved in the working environment, such as the SA governmental Department of Rural Development and Land Affairs. Another visiting attendee was planning to put GIS into a practical, live project to assist his community.
The lecture started off with an introduction to the FOSS movement, with some background on how it started. We then went onto open source GIS, along with a few case studies of open source GIS. This included the Department of Land Affair’s Introduction to GIS resources, mention of the OpenModeller project and AFIS project. Then I went onto QGIS, introducing the software and some of the features, along with a demo.
Talking about free & open source GIS
Later that week, we followed up with a practical using QGIS and showing how it could achieve the same results that they did their practical test in ArcGIS. Added to that the students were all given discs to take home (thank you to Kevin for organising this) and will be able to use QGIS at home.
I explained to them the different ways on how to get help: through the user manuals, wiki’s, forums, IRC and mailing lists. Feedback from the class was good One of the students commented on the user friendliness of the interface and another was interested in doing an internship on open source GIS technology.
Students using QGIS:
Here is what our course attendees were producing after a day on our course.
A map by Msafiri Mwaikusa
And here is what attendee Nyarobi Makuru produced today…
A map by Nyarobi Makuru
Tomorrow is openModeller day. More to follow…
I’m back in Dar es Sallam for a training workshop (2 days QGIS, 1 day openModeller). Sam Lee Pan and Chris Yesson have joined me to help with presentation. Sam introduced herself in an earlier blog post and Chris is an ex-colleague from my time working for the University of Reading, UK. Chris has excellent knowledge of ecological niche modelling and its a real pleasure to have him joining us to share his knowledge with the course attendees.
Street scene in Dar es Salaam
The course is being held at the Dar es Salaam University’s Institute of Technology. We have around 30 attendees who come from academia and state / parastatals.
Chris Yesson (Left), Tim Sutton (Center) and Sam Lee Pan (Right) outside the University of Dar es Salaam institute of technology.
It’s always refreshing to present QGIS courses and see how well received the software is and how easy it is for new users to pick up and get running with quickly.
Sam showing one of our trainees the ropes!
During the course of the day we covered loading vector data, symbolisation, labelling and basic digitising.
Chris explaining the intricacies of QGIS to one of the course attendees.
The training course is part of the final stages of the work we have been doing for GBIF. Our work adds several new tools (non spatial table support, raster calculator, CSW client overhaul, darwin core data provider, openModeller plugin) – some of which have been added into the core of QGIS and will be in the upcoming QGIS 1.6 release.
We ended the day with a free form ‘map a beautiful map’ session and I was really impressed with the quality of work the attendees produced – all of them created nice neat projects with several layers, labels, customised symbology and so on. I’m going to try to take some screenshots of a few of the better ones tomorrow and post them here for the world to see … until then, happy QGIS’sing!
Horst and I are spending the week up in Johannesburg at the Satellite Applications Center in Hartebeeshoek. We are doing yet another week long training course (I hope I’m not working the poor guy too hard 
). This time we are doing:
- Two days QGIS (with a little GRASS)
- One day PostGIS
- Two days geospatial programming with Bash, Python and QGIS
Tomorrow we start with the PostGIS component. Horst and I have been compiling some course notes for the PostGIS module which we are making available to the world as per usual. The pdf still has some rendering issues – we are aware of that. The document tries to walk the reader through the basics of using SQL and then some basic activities with PostGIS and working with geometries.
I hope some of you out there find it useful – let us know if you do! Also if you have any improvements to make, we’d love to hear from you.
Here is a quick pic or two from the course:
