Sunday, 5 February 2006

This presentation is part of: Soils Posters

OpenAg.Info: A Geospatial Technologies and Precision Agriculture Education Initiative.

Jared D. Williams, David A. Crouse, and Rob E. Austin. North Carolina State University, Department of Soil Science, Campus Box 7619, Raleigh, NC 27695

The internet is a source of information for those seeking to enhance their education. Over the last 5 years, many universities made significant progress in offering college-credit courses and continuing education short courses through distance education. Geospatial technologies and precision agriculture are areas of increased interest in distance learning education. OpenAg.Info is a website designed for creating and distributing courseware components focused on geospatial technologies and precision agriculture. The idea behind OpenAg.Info is to provide an open gateway for both development and distribution of content. The content is freely available for download and may be altered to fit personal teaching and learning objectives. Users in the OpenAg.Info community are encouraged to contribute material thereby increasing the content and reducing the unnecessary repetition of information. The OpenAg.Info project includes a knowledge base, download center, image gallery, and web links site. The knowledge base consists of the Geospatial Technologies and Precision Agriculture Encyclopedia and the Soil Science Encyclopedia. The download center allows users to download slides, Macromedia® Shockwave media, teaching resources, soil survey maps, and soil base map data. The image gallery contains approximately 1,000 photographs categorized into subjects such as variable-rate equipment, global positioning systems, and soil fertility. The web links section includes links to university, commercial, and government website focused on geospatial technologies and precision agriculture. OpenAg.Info’s public license agreement allows many people to work together to improve teaching materials and distance education without the drawbacks of common copyright restrictions.

See more of Soils Posters
See more of The ASA Southern Regional Branch (February 5-7, 2006)