A Little Press for a Geospatial Instructional Technologist

My local newspaper, the Poughkeepsie Journal, published an announcement about my upcoming Fulbright to the University of the West Indies in yesterday's paper and All Points Blog got a hold of it. Thanks for posting this, Adena! I hope to meet you some day soon.

No, you do not have to be a faculty member to earn a Fulbright grant.

But I found this blog post from a tweet from FulbrightSchlrs, who wisely thought to send this info along to @vassarnews. Hint!

NITLE GIS Conference Agenda Announced

As mentioned in a previous post, NITLE will hold a Geospatial Technologies conference September 25 to 27, 2009 at Skidmore College. This conference is designed for NITLE school members who wish to learn more about geospatial technologies and network with those who support and do GIS and other geospatial tools.

The conference planners, all terrific and hard-working geospatial professionals at liberal arts colleges, designed an excellent program. To review the agenda, please visit the Geospatial Technologies conference website or go directly to the agenda document. This is a working document and may be subject to minor change.

The deadline for registration is August 28th, 2009 - one week from this Friday. For your convenience, 20 rooms have been reserved at the The Saratoga Hilton at a special NITLE rate of $179 (plus sales and occupancy taxes), please call 518-693-1005 by August 25, 2009. After August 25th the rate and room availability cannot be guaranteed.

For more information, contact one of the conference planners:

Andy Anderson, Amherst College

Jon Caris, Smith College

Alex Chaucer, Skidmore College

Jenni Lund, Wheaton College

Sharron Macklin, Williams College

David Tatem, Trinity College

Bird Research at Vassar Using GIS

The URSI (Undergraduate Research Summer Institute) summer program at Vassar teams Vassar professors with a student or students interested in a compelling research project. Check out Prof. Mary Ann Cunningham and Earth Science major Laurel Walker VC '11 working on a bird project and using GIS to bring it all together. Mary Ann teaches the GIS classes at Vassar. Plus you can also check out Vassar's GIS Lab!

John Quincy Adams, Early Geotwitterer

In a story that integrates a few of my favorite things (geospatial information, Twitter and history), the New York Times discussed the discovery of some of John Quincy Adams' ship logs from a trip across the Atlantic in 1809. Ever so brief, Adams' diary notations fit the description of 'microblogging,' most of his log entries were under 140 characters. And of special note: whenever possible, Adams' documented his latitude and longitude in his 'post.' From yesterday's article:

"Jeremy B. Dibbell, an assistant reference librarian at the society, said a graduate student at Simmons College here saw the diary a few months ago in the society’s archives and thought it looked like a Twitter feed, though written in Adams’s meticulous script and bound in leather."

Follow along on the sea voyage of John Q. Adams here on Twitter. I guess someone should geolocate those tweets as they are posted...