Syllabus

Class 1: (September 2)

Hello My Name Is...

Let's find out who you are, what you're interested in and what you hope to get out of this class. We'll walk through the syllabus, class structure and goals for the semester and discuss the world of location-based services, tools and technologies. Topics: History of LBS, building blocks and tools, breakdown of LBS categories, examples of projects and products and startups and services that define the space.

Assignments:

- Create a profile page on the Wiki. Tell us what brings you to this class and what you’re interested in exploring this semester.

- Brush up on your tech skills - get your MySQL database back up and running and get some PHP/Ruby talking to it via a web form.

- Your first weekly research assignment (topic TBD) - post your findings on the Wiki (1-2 paragraphs). Remember: finders keepers - no duplicate projects!

Class 2: (September 9)

Placing Yourself #1 (Let the users do the work!)

Let’s turn some user-generated content into location coordinates! This week we’ll get our hands dirty with geocoders, data service providers, mapping APIs, and the different ways of using web and mobile tools to gather location data from users. We’ll also walk through the basics of product development (wireframing, user experience design) to help us turn the ideas in our heads into projects and products we can release into the wild.

Class 3: (September 16)

Placing Yourself #2 (Let technology do the work!)

If week two was all how to let users’ telling us of their location, this week will focus on the tools that can do the dirty work for us. We’ll look at the different types of location tracking technologies we can use to collect geocoordinates (GPS, A-GPS, cell ID, triangulation, IP lookup), the data formats we can use to publish this data (KML, XML, GeoRSS, GeoURL) and the services that are best suited for data visualizations (mapping APIs, Google Earth). Special guest Andrew Turner from Mapufacture will help lead the charge.