Geoscience Education and Cyberinfrastructure Mike Wright DLESE Program Center (DPC) University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Tamara Sumner, Qianyi Gu University of Colorado at Boulder Mark Gahegan Penn. State University

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Geoscience Education and Cyberinfrastructure
Mike WrightDLESE Program Center
(DPC)University Corporation for Atmospheric
Research (UCAR)Tamara Sumner, Qianyi
GuUniversity of Colorado at BoulderMark
GaheganPenn. State University
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Key Questions for CI and Education

• What is the vision?
• What are the steps to achieving the vision?
• How can we integrate CI to transform teaching and
  learning?
• How can geoscience education inform CI
  development and impact?

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Workshop Outcomes and Response

• Educational concerns as driver, deeply integrated
  into CI technology and processes
• Use GEON as a testbed
• Collaborate and build new social structures
  between learners, educators, geoscientists, IT
• Dynamic models of student understanding to
  underpin personalized learning environments

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Objectives

• Developing partnership between GEON, LEAD, and
  DLESE
• Partnering teachers, scientists, and
  technologists to develop high quality teaching
  boxes with and about shared CI
• Integrating knowledge organization systems being
  developed within GEON and DLESE
• Foundation for personalized learning environments
  based on CI

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Knowledge Organization Systems

• Community resources vocabularies, thesauri,
  concept spaces, ontologies
• Education examples learning goals, common
  student conceptions and misconceptions
• AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science
  Literacy and Strand Maps
• What students should know, or be able to do, at
  key stages in their K-12 education across STEM
  disciplines
• Visual representation illustrating desired
  changes in student understanding over time

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Example of AAAS Strand Map
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Strand Map Service (NSDL/DLESE)
Exploring library resources by interactively
browsing concepts
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Strand Map Service and CI

• Illustrates educational CI
• Learning environment based entirely on web
  services
• SMS web service makes visual components available
  to developers
• Evaluation results a useful cognitive tool
• Controlled study examined influence of interface
  on cognitive processes of undergraduates
• Compared visual interface and keyword-based
  interface
• Students focused on science content, twice as
  much using visual interface, as opposed to query
  construction and surface features

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GEON Shared CI for concepts
ConceptVISTA and Codex, Mark Gahegan, Penn State
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Advance Knowledge Sharing (Concept only so
far!) The Integrative Data Viewer (IDV) and other
such tools can access multiple datasets served by
GEON and save and share the view using a
Bundle. An advanced application could allow the
user not only to share this visualization bundle
of integrated data and model files, but also the
concepts that led the user to create a particular
bundle. Since each individual dataset is
registered to an ontology(ies) at GEON, the user
could in principle create a new cross-cutting
ontology with associated concepts. An ambitious
user could also register the new concept for
educational purposes to a strand map. (C.
Meertens, 20 April 2005)
Educator Point of View User saves IDV xml
bundle, creates associated material that is
registered to a strand map
GEON Portal IDV user grabs data from several data
ontologies (perhaps unrelated as shown)
IDV User views all three data sources together
and comes to a brilliant integrative science
thought!
Scientist Point of View User saves IDV xml
bundle, creates a new integrated knowledge
concept space, and saves thought in my GEON
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To conclude

• Challenges in modeling learning goals illustrate
  importance of educational concerns as drivers
• Converging approaches and technologies across
  geoscience research and education
• Ex knowledge organization systems
• GEON serving as a forum for fostering
  collaboration and sharing

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www.jcdl2005.org ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on
Digital Libraries Sponsors DLESE, NSDL,
University of Colorado at Boulder General Chair
Mary Marlino UCAR Program Chairs Tamara Sumner,
U. of Colorado Frank Shipman, Texas AM