PATHWAYS

Pathway for K-Gray Engineering Education
The K-Gray Engineering Education Pathway is the engineering "wing" of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The Colorado School of Mines, University of Colorado at Boulder, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Duke University, and University of California-Berkeley are collaborating to provide a comprehensive engineering portal for high-quality teaching and learning resources in engineering, computer science, information technology and engineering technology. Project goals are to: 1) merge NEEDS and TeachEngineering into a unified K-Gray engineering educational digital library, 2) significantly grow high quality resources in the NSDL Engineering Pathway in a sustainable way, 3) align the unified curricular materials with appropriate undergraduate and K-12 educational standards, 4) grow the participation of content providers and users, 5) enhance quality control and review protocols for Engineering Pathway content, and 6) create a nonprofit strategy and partnership for the sustainability of the Engineering Pathway. PI contacts: Michael Mooney, Jaquelyn Sullivan, Martha Cyr, Joseph Tront, and Alice Agogino.

ComPADRE Pathway to Physics and Astronomy Education
Through a partnership of authors and organizations ComPADRE acts as a steward for the educational resources in the NSDL used by broad communities in physics and astronomy by creating and sustaining a network of collections that provide learning resources and interactive learning environments. The ComPADRE Pathway supports teachers and learners by providing both the content and services needed to enhance physics and astronomy education on the Web. ComPADRE is a network of Web-based content collections serving specific communities in physics and astronomy, including teachers of introductory courses at the high school or college levels, undergraduate physics and astronomy majors, researchers in physics education, societies of minority physicists, teachers and students in upper-level courses, and life-long learners. These collections, built by and for the communities, provide links to high-quality learning resources available on the Web and host resources that would not otherwise have a reliable Web presence. Resources in the collections are approved by editors before becoming available, are organized specifically for each community, and undergo a formal peer review process for some collections. PI contact: Bruce Mason.

BiosciEdNet (BEN) Collaborative Pathway
The BiosciEdNet (BEN) Collaborative is expanding its stewardship role for professional societies and coalitions in the biological sciences through an NSDL Pathway project that provides resources, tools, and professional development for educators at the high school and undergraduate levels, including community colleges. BEN serves as a catalyst for professional societies or coalitions that seek to build their own education-focused digital libraries or contribute resources to the BEN portal, and that want to collaborate on effective pedagogy, authentic assessment, and development of multidisciplinary biological sciences resources. PI contact: Yolanda George.

Materials Digital Library Pathway: Hub for Materials Education and Research
In this project a consortium of organizations is building an information infrastructure on the foundation of the current Materials Science Digital Library collection (MatDL) and assuming stewardship of significant content and services to support the integration of education and research in materials science (MS). Additionally, this Pathways project is facilitating the dissemination of resources generated by government-funded MS collaborations. The MatDL partnership includes information/library scientists and materials scientists affiliated with government and research/teaching institutions: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Kent State University, MIT, University of Michigan, Iowa State University, and Purdue University. To multiply the impact of NSF-supported materials efforts, this network of collaborations is being extended to include several related NSF initiatives: Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams, Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers, and International Materials Institutes. PI contact: Laura Bartolo.

SERVICES

An NSDL Registry: Supporting Interoperable Metadata Distribution
This Services track project is a collaboration of investigators from the University of Washington and Cornell University who are developing and deploying a metadata registry service to complement the NSDL Central Metadata Repository. The registry is based on the open-source Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Registry application and enables multiple diverse collection providers and other NSDL projects to identify, declare, and publish their metadata schemas (element/property sets) and schemes (controlled vocabularies). PI contact: Diane Hillmann.

Services to Link Opencourseware Repositories and the NSDL
This NSDL Services project is improving the discoverability of course materials that institutions are placing in "opencourseware" repositories. Located at Utah State University this project has three primary tasks: to enable federated searching across distributed institutional sites, to develop a portal to these repositories, and to facilitate harvesting of metadata and course materials by the NSDL. PI contact: Brandon Muramatsu.

Math Forum and would like to use it with their students but need support to do so; and (3) those who find a site like the Math Forum and need support to even think that they could make use of it in their classes. PI contact: Gene Klotz.

Facilitating K-12 Selection in an Annotated Rich Media Library of Animal Behavior
This services project is making the online Macaulay Library which hosts the world's largest collection of animal sounds and animal behavior videos more accessible to many segments of the public and is providing tools to K-12 teachers enabling them to readily incorporate these animal resources into the curriculum. The three principal items resulting from the project activities are: 1. geographic mapping tools overlaying the digital Macaulay Library collection; 2. a collection of voucher specimens that are facilitating teachers in choosing appropriate recordings for inclusion in classroom activities; 3. library users being able to link animal recordings with geographic locations. PI contact: Jack Bradbury.

Pedagogic Services for Digital Libraries
The National STEM Digital Library (NSDL) is providing a growing array of services to improve the effectiveness of its STEM teaching materials to users. This project connects pedagogic materials to teaching materials in digital library collections. It is helping teachers and faculty understand how to use STEM materials in ways that are engaging, interesting, and effective, embodying key principles of teaching and learning. The project is building on a successful example, the Starting Point Digital Library, a design that ensures that seekers of teaching materials also find pedagogic information, and vice versa. A new set of tools is being created to enable other digital libraries to link the pedagogic materials developed by this project to teaching materials in their library while establishing mechanisms for creating a much broader collection of pedagogic materials and examples. PI contact: Cathryn Manduca.

Earth Exploration Toolbook Workshops to Facilitate the Use of Earth Science Data in Education
The Earth Exploration Toolbook is an online resource for teachers and students. It is a collection of computer-based learning activities within the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). Activities or "chapters" in the EET provide step-by-step instructions for accessing specific data and analyzing it with a software analysis tool to explore issues or concepts in science, technology, and mathematics. EET chapters use a variety of technology tools, including geographic information systems (GIS), image processing programs, spreadsheet applications, and others. EET chapters facilitate access to a wide range of datasets, including Landsat data from NASA, climate-modeling data from EOS-Webster, and earthquake data from the USGS, along with many others. In this project, the use of Earth science data by students is being facilitated through EET Data Analysis Workshops: two-hour professional development experiences for teachers on using the NSDL, DLESE, and an EET chapter. PI contact: Carla McAuliffe.

Professional Development Institutes to Increase Afterschool Educators' Use of the NSDL
In partnership with the California School-Age Consortium (CalSAC), an established statewide after-school leader-training network, this project makes use of new curricular modules and existing STEM resources found in the Exploratorium digital library and the NSDL to create and offer professional development institutes for use by state and regional after school organizations. Professional development institutes consist of four linked components: (1) workshops and seminars, (2) technical assistance, (3) a collegial community of practitioners, and (4) curricular modules that combine NSDL digital resources and tools with inquiry-based, hands-on science activities for after school audiences. Unlike many after school activities, the curricular modules are designed to be academically challenging, science-rich, and youth interest-driven. In addition to workshops for after school leaders and their teaching staff, the project documents the words used by youth and after school educators to search and access the Exploratorium Digital Library, mapping these to scientific vocabularies as metadata to help make NSDL more usable to educators and the underrepresented youth they serve. PI contact: Sherry Hsi.

TARGETED RESEARCH

Customizing Resources for NSDL
One promise of the Internet is educational "mass customization." Thanks to the National Science Digital Library, the opportunity exists to filter millions of resources and customize them for individual learners. This NSDL targeted research project is organizing digital libraries by dimensions that are important to teachers and learners--specifically, cognitive characteristics (cognitive development, spatial and math retrieval skills, reading level), affective characteristics (self-efficacy, motivation, beliefs/attitudes toward the subject), and social characteristics (gender, main language, ethnicity). The investigators hypothesize that customization of resources will result in visitors spending more time in NSDL and students achieving more in-depth learning. As a testbed, the investigators are creating a customized learning environment, "Customized MathForum," within the Math Forum Digital Library, which is one of the most popular instructional digital libraries and has one of the largest communities of users (over a million individuals). PI contact: Beverly Woolf.

Personalization of Content: Bridging the Gap Between NSDL and its Users Through the Course Website
This Targeted Research project aims to investigate and develop technology that allows a college-level course website to be the hub of activity for students and faculty who want access to the National STEM Education Digital Library (NSDL). The end product is a flexible and personalized information-seeking interface that customizes interactions for educators and learners using the NSDL. To provide this functionality seamlessly in the existing NSDL infrastructure and prevailing usage contexts, the project team is: 1. Conducting user studies to learn about student and faculty needs and activities with regard to course websites; 2. Evaluating the composition of context-sensitive services to determine the most common interaction sequences requested by users and to "factor out" the necessary NSDL services that should be composed; and 3. Developing an integrated personalization framework, exploiting the commonality of personalized interaction in various settings and reflecting this commonality in a factored software architecture. PI contact: Manuel Perez.
Related Link: http://nsdl.org/