If you're interested in finding out about future workshops, contact the sponsoring organization. The KNC helps faculty, staff, and students. ESRI offers a variety of on-line courses through its Virtual Campus . The Map Library has five PCs for GIS work available to faculty, staff, and students. If you're a faculty member, you also have access to the Faculty Exploratory computers.
Instructions are available on the website.
The answer to this changes almost daily, as organizations worldwide are rapidly creating data and making more of it available. The Map Library and ESALab webpages have links to many websites from which you can download data. The Map Library has a collection of data on CD as well. The China Data Center has a large collection of spatial data on China available to download. GIS files are large, so as you get more involved in it, you may find you need more space.