Dr. Anthony Robinson of Penn State is continuing development of the first geo-MOOC, a massive open online course titled Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, which begins in July. I spoke with Dr. Robinson in February, just after the course was announced. In part two of our conversation recorded April 16, he shares the challenges and opportunities after working with the Coursera platform, visiting with Esri education team, and contemplating how to assess tens of thousands of students.

Zombie-based learning teaches geography skills against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. The Kickstarter campaign was funded last year and products were recently distributed.

Have you ever wanted to see the view from the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania? Google is making that possible — sending employees up the world's highest peaks with digital cameras, tripods and fisheye lenses to take photos that can be stitched together for a 360 degree view. Image Luca Galuzzi - www.galuzzi.it under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en

Drones on top of drones. New, commercial drones take off. Some say our skies will be dark with privately-owned drones.

Geospatial technology and energy management seem to be intertwined in so many operational and strategic areas for utilities. In today's Directions Magazine podcast, Editor in Chief Joe Francica interviews Oracle's Brad Williams, vice president of the company's global business unit, to discuss how utility companies are leveraging geospatial information to managing everything from smart grid technology to outage management.

The phrase "unmanned drones" typically conjures images of places like Afghanistan. But the Federal Aviation Administration says it wants to start testing the civilian use of aerial drones here in the U.S. and has already issued special permits to a few police departments interested in trying them out. But after a raucous Seattle City Council hearing earlier this month, the mayor killed the drone program. http://www.npr.org/2013/02/22/172696814/as-police-drones-take-off-washington-state-pushes-back

Technology you will wear. Google’s glasses. Apple’s iWatch. And “augmented reality” on its way. Guests Omar Gallaga, technology culture writer for the Austin American-Statesman. (@omarg) Amber Case, director of the Portland R&D Center for the tech firm Esri. (@caseorganic) Ben Chigier, retired software engineer and entrepreneur. He and his daughter each own a pair of “augmented” ski goggles. Full details: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/02/28/wearable-tech-and-augmented-reality

On Feb 21, 2013 Penn State announced that it will join several dozen universities in offering massive open online courses or MOOCs via the for profit Coursera company. Among the Penn State MOOCs to be offered later this year is what is believed to be the first geography or GIS MOOC: Maps and the Geospatial Revolution. Its author, Dr. Anthony Robinson discusses the role of MOOCs at Penn State and the development of the first Geo-MOOC.

In this Data Informed podcast, Dangermond explains how those consumer trends influenced Esri to work on a new version of its ArcGIS platform designed for the cloud and around online collaboration. The company unveiled the new version in June 2012. Dangermond also discusses Esri’s plans to build new connectors to business intelligence tools like MicroStrategy, as well as develop three-dimensional visualizations to conduct spatial data mining using resources such as Hadoop.

Welcome to another Directions Magazine podcast.Editor in chief, Joe Francica speaks with Bob Denaro. Mr. Denaro is currently the chair of the U S Department of Transportation Intelligence Transportation Systems (ITS) Program Federal Advisory Committee; he is a member of the TRB ITS Committee, and some National Academy of Sciences, Mapping Sciences Committee. In interview focuses on connected cars, automated vehicles and what it means for location based services. He is a former Vice President Advanced Driver Assistance Systems at Nokia and an Air Force Academy graduate in Astronautics.