Teachers are always looking for ways to capture their students' interest and to make the learning process fun and exciting. The "Kids on the Land" (KoL) program has moved the classroom to the great outdoors and have implemented a hands-on learning experience to teach student's science, math and land management practices.

Forensic Oceanography (FO) is a project led by Charles Heller, Lorenzo Pezzani and Situ Studio as part of the European Research Council project “Forensic Architecture” directed by Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London (http://www.forensic-architecture.org). It aims to use geospatial technology to document the violations of migrants’ rights and deaths at sea.

GIS users, even those who don’t consider themselves programmers, may have heard of a mysterious location on the Web called GitHub. What is it and what do GIS users need to know about it?

CloudMade is best known for making OpenStreetMap a more valuable data platform for software developers. In February, the company enhanced its offerings to address the needs of today’s location-based services developers. Directions Magazine interviewed Nick Black, CloudMade co-founder and VP Product, to explore the CloudMade 2013 vision.

John Snow is famously known among geospatial professionals as demonstrating one of the first applications of spatial analysis to detect the cholera outbreak in London in 1854. This retrospective by Beth Skwarecki "brings together so many important aspects of public health that we’re still learning from today."

Bing Maps is often integrated into SharePoint sites to display different types of information, from the location of customers to advance business intelligence information. A common task that needs to be carried out at some point is geocoding the location data so it can be displayed on a map. Ricky Brundritt of Microsoft's EMEA group provides a step-by-step workflow to make it happen.

After tornadoes touched down in the Southeast on April 27, 2011, many people in the storm's path did the most logical thing they could-they posted images of the aftermath on Facebook.

Is a geofence something a marketer or software developer draws, or is it a boundary that already exists? Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg looked into datasets from data provider Maponics, which are described by the company as predefined geofences that are ready to be used in location-based applications.

There has been a lot of talk about Esri’s new technical certifications on various listservs, boards and blogs. While certification is nothing new to many of the disciplines GIS specialist/professionals work with such as IT, Planning, Project Management, Surveying, Tax Assessment, and so on, it is relatively new to the GIS field. Tripp Corbin of Keck & Wood tells us more about vendor-specific certification exams.

The Sunlight Foundation chimed in on an Ohio Supreme Cout decision covered at All Points Blog last week. While the decision was about an open records law, Tom Lee believes the decision supports the use of open data formats.