Spring semester is just about to begin and here at the University of Kentucky we'll be doing much more balloon and kite mapping to follow up from our initial forays last fall.

As we did last semester, we'll be combining DIY mapping into our intro GIS course. Unlike last fall however we want to actually have the students collect the imagery in addition to just using it in their projects.

Last time faculty and grad students collected the imagery, and students in the class used mapknitter.org to stitch selected pictures together, before importing the georeferenced imagery into ArcGIS.

(It might be possible to compare this approach with Esri's ArcGIS raster mosaic tool to see which is more intuitive, gives better results, etc.)

For updates on our efforts, see the New Mappings Collaboratory