All right, well thank you for squeezing me into this presentation or this block. My name is Bill Weatherholt. I am an assistant professor of geography in western Maryland at Frostburg State, and I'm just going to talk sort of briefly about my sort of dipping my toe into the OSM universe because I am decidedly a newbie yet. So just a

quick little overview, I'll give you a little rationale why I've sort of started to embrace OSM. An idea of the initial lesson plans that I've tried to incorporate, some of the student feedback that I've gotten so far, and maybe where I can take it. So really for the rationale, my lab stuff

for a cartography class in geography is really, it's pretty heavily reliant on ArcMap and a lot of its tangential software, which is often met with a variety of success and stories of failure

in my class. Some shine and go on to produce really good work, some stick with it and sort of grind it out and come out the other side relatively unscathed, but there's another significant cohort of students that really struggle in my lesson plan, and that's, you know, I don't receive some sort of sick satisfaction in not giving students good grades. And in that,

the idea that cartography and GIS are not synonymous with one another, so despite the stranglehold that some of the industrial titans have on mapping software, there are other mediums where students and other people can communicate spatially. And in my human geography course, in the beginning of the semester, I like to show

the geospatial revolution that Penn State has put together, and it's already about 10 years old, but in it, it incorporates a little bit of humanitarian mapping with the 2010 Haiti earthquake and sort of just driving home the integration of geospatial technology in just everyday life.

And so the seed was sort of planted in the back of my mind, and in 2019, I attended, or I'm a reader for the AP Human Geography readings, and there was an event that Stephen Johnson coordinated with Teach OSM, and I attended it, and through some subsequent conversations, both just talking on the phone and email and in Slack, et cetera, really talked about

the need for mapping in Western Maryland and the deficiencies that are out here, and with the COVID pandemic and the push to having to be completely online, sort of everything was in place to embrace the software a little bit more.

And so originally, when I first, the first semester I introduced OSM, it was just a humanitarian exercise, and I think I was doing a disservice both to the students and to the agency that needed the mapping. Like I said, I'm still kind of a newbie,

and this was a couple semesters ago, but I have since expanded and sort of drawn out the lesson plan a bit. I have a lab where I just introduce the students to the software and walk them through setting up an account and watching the appropriate videos on adding features, and then I just have them create 10 sets of edits, and then that's it for the first lab.

And then the next lab, they build on that material and addressing those deficiencies in Western Maryland or with the pandemic wherever they are, adding some local contributions, and then moving on to humanitarian web mapping. So I show a couple of the State Department videos

like the Y map, and essentially the move is to get them to do 100 change sets by the end of the labs. And the student impressions have been pretty positive. You can see one of the students said that OSM can empower communities in a multitude of ways. First, anyone can log in

and contribute, and that OpenStreetMap is like the group project that doesn't fall to just one person. Everyone is contributing something to the overall knowledge of the whole. And also the student mentioned that those that are part of marginalized groups could take back space that may be incorrectly mapped or remapped in a way that's truthful to them or put them on

the map. And I mean that's just a really brief sort of couple of hand-picked sort of open feedback from my lab questions. But the reception has been pretty positive from students, and in particular the students that seem to struggle with some of the other lab exercises. They seem

to really enjoy this part of the semester. So where to go? There's plenty more to be mapped in Western Maryland and Appalachia. I am actively talking to my Gamma Theta Upsilon officers about the possibility of creating a chapter for youth mappers here on campus. I'd like to maybe draw

OpenStreetMap into a semester project, and I know I'm running out of time. My own research interest, Open Historical Map, is super interesting with some repeat photography stuff I've got going on. And like I said, I'm a newbie. So learning more about JOSM and OSM-CHA to go in and look

at my students' chain sets better and provide feedback, and just doing things like this. And ultimately the hope is that I come out on the other end with a web mapping course that is strictly rooted in OpenStreetMap. And so that is my little dipping my toe

in the last two years into this medium, and I thank you for your time.