The 2014 Geostat Summer School was held in Bergen, Norway. I was asked to contribute a lecture and a workshop, and chose to talk about doing spatial processing in Python and using the QGIS desktop GIS package. My lecture notes are available online.
Although I'm funded through research grant income, I still do some teaching at Lancaster. Recently I delivered an MSc module on Environmental Epidemiology for the MSc Statistics students, and a lecture and workshop for a Biology course on computer modelling of disease spread.
This year I was invited to give a lecture on Open Source GIS to the third year undergraduate GIS students after the previous year's cohort asked the course convener to include it as a topic for future students.
Staffordshire University is a growing institution with campuses in Stoke and Stafford. Their home for science is the impressive new building on the Stoke campus. After chatting to John Dover at his inaugural lecture, I was asked to do some workshops on R for staff and students, to introduce them to the possibilities of going beyond what they can do in spreadsheet packages and proprietary statistics software. The notes and presentations are online.
I was asked by the Macroecology group of the British Ecology Society to deliver some training on spatial analysis in R at their 2013 meeting in Sheffield. This was a full-day workshop, and included practical sessions and a chance for the 80 or so delegates to explore their own data. The workshop notes are online and licensed under a creative commons license.
The workshop sessions before the annual UseR! meetings are always popular. I was accepted to present a half-day session on Spatial Data Handling in R at the UseR! 2012 Meeting in Nashville, home of an impressive recreation of the Athens Parthenon!
There was a good attendance at the workshop, and it was a great opportunity to talk to a number of end-users of spatial R software and get ideas for the further development of packages.
Every northern hemisphere summer Google fund a number of open source development studentships under their "Google Summer of Code" (GSOC) flag. These are mainly targeted at students on their summer break. Most of the major open source applications bid for studentships, and match students with mentors who guide the student and assess their progress.
I've mentored two GSOC students for developing R packages for statistical analysis. As you can see from the picture I have literally done that, been there, and got the t-shirt. Actually the t-shirt and the good feeling of helping a student progress in their skills are the only rewards for mentors!
I spent a week in Vancouver teaching and tutoring at the Simon Fraser University summer school on spatial statistics along with Patrick Brown and several other lecturers with other specialisms including forest fires and climate modelling.
I designed a one-day workshop to cover several aspects of Open Source Geospatial computing, including basic data structures, the open source desktop GIS "QGIS", spatial analysis in R and creating interactive web mapping. Seeing that this was too much for me to deliver alone, I recruited other experts to help, so each workshop was taught with four lecturers.
The sessions were fully subscribed at Lancaster for two days, so we also took it on the road and delivered the workshop at Leicester University.
At the end of each day we sent the students out with GPS units to make a contribution to OpenStreetMap!
The Quest project was a NERC-funded programme to take a wide, integrated view of the effects of global environmental change.
Some of the project team invited myself and Roger Bivand to a workshop at Dartington Hall in Devon to talk about the potential for analysing geospatial data using R. I think we opened the eyes of several people to the possibilities and freedoms of using a programming language for analysis. One of the Quest team, Andy South, went on to develop a simple world mapping package for R with a little help from me.