Hi Everybody!

I joined the guild to connect with like-minded carto-nerds and GIS lovers!

I am a geospatial research librarian at a public university, and am looking for ways to connect my love of Fantasy to my work as a GIS and geography and earth sciences librarian and instructor. I was thinking of designing and developing a workshop series (2-3 workshops) for the fall semester about Fantasy Cartography, with the hope of introducing some cartographic elements and best practices, integrating fundamental geography and geoscience principles, and encouraging students to get more involved with map-making throughout their college experience.

While I have approval from the library to run the workshops, I would love any input for how I can make it fun, non-lectury, and interesting! I have so much time between now and the fall to really design this workshop to be as fun and as interesting as possible! I'm also not too familiar with design-oriented software or anything that's not in the ESRI family, and would love some suggestions for a good place to start messing around with some free versions or cartographic software that I can then introduce to cash-strapped students. Also-if you are in fact, a college student, do you think students would be interested in this? Would they (god forbid) come to something like this outside of their normal class time?

Thank you guys so much, and once again, it's GREAT to meet ya!