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OSM Training at Eastern University of Sri Lanka in Batticaloa
Posted by Suthakaran on 29 October 2017 in English.It was a great opening to make a relationship with Eastern University of Sri Lanka in Batticaloa that I could able to manage two days OSM training for the students. Lecturers and students were appreciated and looking forward to hear more training in future.
Department of Geography, Eastern University of Sri Lanka has requested to me to do more activities on OSM and they are ready to contribute to develop OSM map in Sri Lanka.
Discussion
Comment from Suthakaran on 29 October 2017 at 17:27
This is one of the training program photos
Comment from SomeoneElse on 29 October 2017 at 19:49
Hi, What support and training was given to the students when they started mapping?
There were a number of problems with these users’ contributions, the most serious of which as a drag and drop of a large town in northern Sri Lanka 100km to the east. Several other new mappers drew a number of doodles in Europe and northern Canada which had to be reverted. A quick count up suggests that roughly half of all mappers identified as part of this project made changes so severe that had to be reverted.
Part of the problem was that the students were all starting with JOSM (which is simply inappropriate for someone who’s just starting out - a node drag of a large town is simply impossible in e.g. iD, yet in JOSM it’s frighteningly easy). One thing worth thinking about in the future for students’ first edits in JOSM - use the dev server. That way they can experiment and when they’ve got the hang of things can start mapping things for real.
Was any thought given to using existing learning resources? http://learnosm.org/en/ is one that springs to mind but there are other similar examples - I’m sure that a question to one of OSM’s mailing lists or the help site beforehand would have yielded more offers of existing “new mapper” toolkits. Unfortunately instead the OSM community had to spend time going through the contributions working out which were plausible and which were not.
Please take this comment in the spirit in which it is intended - not as an admonishment, but as something that might help avoiding these sorts of problems in the future. OSM needs new mappers, and the best new mappers for any area are the ones local to it - that’s why it’s great to see that a number of the students are now doing field-based mapping around Eastern University itself.
Best Regards, Andy (from the Data Working Group)
Comment from Suthakaran on 30 October 2017 at 02:13
Dear Andy,
Yes I also noticed this issue, thank you very much for your kind information. it was happened 1st day training but second they were ware on these issue and did their work carefully. hope they have promised me to continue the activities without any problem.
I have shared with them all the materiel and useful link to them.
I thank you again.
Best Regards, S.Suthakaran
Comment from GOwin on 31 October 2017 at 04:39
From our own community experience in the Philippines, we don’t JOSM as inappropriate for beginners - provided there’s enough time to provide proper training, and guidance. The caveat is that, it’s challenging to teach it in one day (but not impossible).
During any training activity, we try to remind participants that we often work with live data, so if they are unsure about their work, they can ask for assistance from workshop facilitators.
So what drives our choice of editor when running OSM training?
Comment from SomeoneElse on 1 November 2017 at 09:19
@GOwin That makes perfect sense - it’s the proper training (and the time to do it) that’s key.