Community Services Standing Committee (CSSC) [2]
Chair David Yaron reported that the first "Tooltimes" conference call was held last week to "reach into" the community by offering useful demonstrations of sharable technology. "Tooltimes" are online meetings that combine a phone conference with computer demos for presenters to showcase services and projects. If you are interested in participating in the community services committee, please sign up for the mailing list at http://nsdl.org/resources_for/library_builders/emaillists.php

Laura Bartolo, MatDL, was elected Chair of the committee. Flora McMartin, Merlot, will serve as Vice-chair and Anne Diekema, Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP), will serve as Co-chair through December 2006.

Content Standing Committee [3]
Kim Lightle, Content Standing Committee Chair is leading an effort to collect controlled vocabularies from projects. The meeting focused on efforts to conclude this work in the next couple of months. The committee also discussed the NSDL Registry Survey, the NSDL.org web site redesign, the NSDL resource recommender process, and reusabiliy recommendations.

Educational Impact and Evaluation Standing Committee [4]
On behalf of Chair Anita Coleman, Laura Bartolo, Co-chair, explained that the Educational Impact and Evalutation Standing Commmittee (EIESC) is working on a pilot web metrics project. Project members have been looking into grade level analysis and vocabulary expansion. Mic Khoo, who is Core Integration's evaluation specialist, is working on overall NSDL evaluation.

Dave Yaron of the Chem Collective (Carnegie Mellon University) and Scott Lathrop of Shodor Foundation were elected co-chairs of the committee.

Technology Standing Committee [5]
Robby Robson chairs the Technology Standing Committee (TSC), Co-chaired by Martin Halbert and Ed Almasey. The TSC is a forum for work on standards, scientific mark-up languages, authentication, documentation, and other issues related to NSDL technology development.

At the TSC meeting held during the Annual Meeting Robson led a discussion to begin seeking NSDL Documentation Requirements. Community input on documentation needs can include requests for new documentation, comments on existing documentation, and suggested links to external documentation.

General requests ("we need documentation on LOM") are good, but specific requests ("Please document which LOM elements should be supported by collections that expose metadata in LOM format.") are even better. Comments will be gathered and collated by the Technology Standing Committee and submitted to Core Integration. Please send comments by the end of December to technology-members@comm.nsdl.org or to robby@computer.org.

Working Group on Fedora APIs: NSDL Core Integration has asked the Technology Standing Committee for assistance in defining and reviewing technical requirements for Fedora APIs. A working group will be formed to provide this feedback. Working group virtual meetings will begin in January and continue for six to eight weeks. Interested persons should send email to the Technology Standing Committee mailing list (technology-members@comm.nsdl.org). Note: please sign up for the mailing list before sending mail to it.

Sustainability Standing Committee [6]
At the NSDL Assembly meeting Paul Berkman, Chair of the Sustainability Standing Committee (SSC) posed the question, "How can the SSC leverage projects' strengths to sustain NSDL beyond the NSF funding period?" He reminded attendees that, "Our decisions will influence education into the future."

The committee agreed to convene a Corporate Framework Workshop in 2006 that would enable NSDL projects to easily incorporate (as either a not-for-profit or for-profit corporation) in a manner that enables them to develop revenue streams for their own sustainability, which would leverage National Science Foundation funds into the future as envisioned by the NSDL program.

The SSC will also aggregate projects based on their sustainability features (e.g., revenue models, disciplinary interests, products or services, infrastructure needs, level of maturity); consider sustainability features or projects that would be part of the single sign-on system; and, contribute to NSDL-wide discussions about branding.

To coordinate these sustainability activities on behalf of the NSDL, the SSC elected its officers for the 2005-2007 period. Dr. Liz Liddy will join Chair Paul Berkman as Co-Chair, and Dr. Lois McLean will serve as Special Projects Coordinator.

Please visit the NSDL Standing Committees' web sites for full committee meeting summaries:

[1] http://policy.comm.nsdl.org/
[2] http://commserv.comm.nsdl.org/
[3] http://content.comm.nsdl.org/
[4] http://eduimpact.comm.nsdl.org/
[5] http://technology.comm.nsdl.org/
[6] http://sustain.comm.nsdl.org/
Related Link: http://nsdl.org/

Teachers would like to search NSDL by standards they are teaching to in order to find interesting classroom resources. For this to happen, standards information must be added to metadata that describe a digital resource.

The Content Assignment Tool (CAT) developed by The Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP) at Syracuse University was funded by the NSF's NSDL Program Services funding track in response to the expressed needs of collection builders, library users and educators to provide educational standards information in conjunction with learning resources. CAT analyzes the content of a resource through natural language processing and then employs search algorithms to make suggestions of relevant standards that a cataloger can approve or discard. Over time, machine learning will improve CAT's accuracy in suggesting relevant standards.

An automatic cross-walk between state and national standards is also being developed by CNLP so that NSDL or other content providers can automatically correlate alternative standard sources (e.g. NY, NSES, MA) to resources that have been assigned standards from a particular state or national standard (e.g. an educator would be able to find the Ohio standard that correlates to an NSES standard).

These tools are designed to improve the ability of teachers to locate resources in the NSDL that support standards-based instruction, no matter what state they are in or where a resource was developed.

Please send an email to info@gmail.com if you would like to be notified of CAT's release.
Related Link: http://www.cnlp.org/

The NSDL Registry Project team and project stakeholders met on Thursday afternoon of the annual meeting for a briefing and discussion of project goals and deliverables. After a short presentation and exchange of information, co-PIs Diane Hillmann and Stuart Sutton boiled down the important questions needing clear answers to the following:

-What kind of services will registry maintainers require to continue to use the Registry?
-What additional value can the Registry provide for those who use registered vocabularies?
-How can the Registry become an integral part of the work of NSDL Projects?

Participants in the meeting were reminded to take a look at the Registry Blog and to fill out the project survey. Both are available from the NSDL Registry website: http://eg2.ischool.washington.edu/registry
Related Link: http://eg2.ischool.washington.edu/registry

Citing survey data from over 500,000 students, 23,000 teachers and 6,000 schools over the last three years Julie Evans, NetDay, gave the closing address at NSDL's Annual Meeting held in Denver Nov. 15-18, 2005. She discussed NetDay's impact in devising online surveys that have given students and teachers a way to collectively express their opinions on national and local educational technology policies. NetDay is a national nonprofit with a 9 year legacy of building local school and community capacity around technology use in education.

Suggesting that students of today are "digital natives" while their parents are "digital immigrants" who may need to change their ideas around teachers as sole "proprietors of knowledge," Evans reviewed strategic approaches to increasing NSDL's visibility and usage in light of NetDay's findings.

Evans believes that NSDL's work on standards and vocabularies; pathways and collections (75% of teachers who responded say that they always or sometimes refresh lessons/projects with Internet information and materials); youth-centered development efforts (Teachers say that as a result of using technology students are more engaged in learning); context for assessment of impact (87% of teachers who responded say that technology is important to their accomplishments as a teacher), and; outreach strategies (49% of teachers who responded say that the greatest impact of technology is in teaching and instructional support) could be enabled by NetDay research results .

Students' thought-provoking responses to the question "What new technologies would you like to see invented that you think will help kids learn in the future," under the theme "Ways to learn and complete school work using technology," included: Make it a game; Take me there; Online classes; Working digitally; A different kind of teacher; A different kind of book, and; Personalized learning with simulations. Does this sound like the future of NSDL?
Related Link: http://netday.org

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL), in partnership with the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Program Center will offer free online professional development workshops for K-12 science and math teachers in hurricane-impacted schools and those teaching hurricane-displaced students. These workshops will provide practical ideas for finding and using digital library resources, with a particular emphasis on strategies that are easy to implement in storm-stressed classrooms and in distance learning courses being offered to displaced students.

The first 90-minute online workshop will be offered on Tuesday December 6th from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Central Time and repeated on Thursday December 8th from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Central Time. There is no charge for the workshops, but space is limited. To register or for more information, contact Susan Van Gundy, NSDL Education and Outreach Director at or 303-497-2946.
Related Link: vangundy@nsdl.ucar.edu

Biological Information Handling: Essentials for Engineers and Pyro: Python Robotics were named the Premier Courseware of 2005 in late October at the annual Frontiers in Education Conference (http://fie.engrng.pitt.edu/fie2005/).

Biological Information Handling: Essentials for Engineers is a self-paced, interactive independent study tutorial that teaches the fundamentals of information transfer in biology to engineers from an engineering perspective and was created by Mary Lidstrom, Cate Speake, David Farkas, Alicia Ann McBride, Patricia Kirkham and Quan Zhou of the University of Washington and Marc Hoffman and Bob Lindenmayer of Poison Dart Frog Media.
Pyro: Python Robotics is a Python-based robotics programming environment that enables students to explore topics in robotics and artificial intelligence. It was created by Doug Blank and Deepak Kumar of Bryn Mawr College, Lisa Meeden of Swarthmore College and Holly Yanco of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

For more information, including how to obtain your complimentary copy of the courseware on CD, please visit the Premier Courseware of 2005 page at www.needs.org.
Related Link: http://www.needs.org/needs/?path=/public/premier/2005/winners/index.jhtml&

Teachers would like to search NSDL by standards they are teaching to in order to find interesting classroom resources. For this to happen, standards information must be added to metadata that describe a digital resource.

The Content Assignment Tool (CAT) developed by The Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP) at Syracuse University was funded by the NSF's NSDL Program Services funding track in response to the expressed needs of collection builders, library users and educators to provide educational standards information in conjunction with learning resources. CAT analyzes the content of a resource through natural language processing and then employs search algorithms to make suggestions of relevant standards that a cataloger can approve or discard. Over time, machine learning will improve CAT's accuracy in suggesting relevant standards.

An automatic cross-walk between state and national standards is also being developed by CNLP so that NSDL or other content providers can automatically correlate alternative standard sources (e.g. NY, NSES, MA) to resources that have been assigned standards from a particular state or national standard (e.g. an educator would be able to find the Ohio standard that correlates to an NSES standard).

These tools are designed to improve the ability of teachers to locate resources in the NSDL that support standards-based instruction, no matter what state they are in or where a resource was developed.

Please send an email to href="mailto:cnlp.info@gmail.com" info@gmail.com if you would like to be notified of CAT's release.
Related Link: http://www.cnlp.org/research/project.asp?recid=48

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and NEEDS--an Engineering Education Digital Library--aunched the Women and Information Technology Collection of Digital Resources on November 7, 2005. Initiated with funding from CISCO, NSF, ACM and Avaya, the W&IT collection offers resources designed to give students, parents and educators the tools to learn more about careers in high-tech fields, ways to encourage young women to excel in math, computing and technology, and details about local clubs, programs, summer camps and curricula. The collection also offers over 500 resources from the ACM-Women Collection.
The collection can be found at: http://www.ncwit.org/resources.repository.html or www.needs.org.
Related Link: http://www.ncwit.org/resources.repository.html

The paper, "Theoretical Remark on the Superconductivity of Metals," was written in 1922 for a symposium honoring Dutch scientist Kamerlingh Onnes, the discoverer of superconductivity, and published by the University of Leiden in the proceedings of the symposium. And there, apparently, it remained largely unnoticed until this year, when it was rediscovered by Neil Ashcroft, the Horace White Professor of Physics at Cornell, and translated from German into English by Bjorn Schmekel, then a Cornell graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Berkeley. An article about discovering the paper can be found here: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov05/Einstein.arXiv.ws.html

Ashcroft submitted the paper to the history of science section of the arXiv e-print service, maintained by Cornell University Library. Arxiv is a repository where physicists, mathematicians, astronomers and some biologists post reports of their research as soon as they are available, in advance of publication in professional journals. ArXiv is part of the NSDL collection. The paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Einstein_A/0/1/0/all/0/1
Related Link: http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Einstein_A/0/1/0/all/0/1

If you presented at the 2005 NSDL Annual Meeting please provide your presentation slides for the community to view on this website, please email your slides to Sharon Clark . Please include your name and session title. The slides will be available at http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/
Related Link: http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/

This report grew out of a workshop series that explored the application of pervasive computing power to education. The goal of the workshops was to develop a map of where NSF can strategically place its resources in creating the learning environments of the future. The report investigates several issues to further this goal:

1. Blending Formal and Informal Learning: How does CELF transcend the conventional boundaries of school-based education to leverage learning taking place across the contexts established by time, space and social arrangements (e.g., non-school activities involving family, community, work and play)? How does it differ from these contexts?
2. Lifelong Learning Chronicles: What forms of rich qualitative and quantitative data need to be collected to dynamically inform the multitude of education stakeholders?
3. Teaching Through the Cyberinfrastructure: What are the new images of teaching and teachers afforded by CELF?
4. Communities of Learners: How can CELF support and transform communities of learners?

Lastly, the report examines some of the policy implications of the CELF initiative, including the risks of not attending to this initiative, privacy and security issues, equity and access issues, and dissemination, including informing the public and decision makers about its potential.
Related Link: http://www.cra.org/reports/cyberinfrastructure.pdf

On November 15, Democratic House Leader Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) unveiled the House Democrats new agenda for national competitiveness. One of the top action items is to create an educated, skilled workforce in the vital areas of science, math, engineering, and information technology.

The report, "Innovation Agenda: A Commitment to Competitiveness to Keep America #1," calls for Congress to work with states, businesses, and universities to develop a new scholarship initiative to educate 100,000 new scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the next four years.
Related Link: http://www.housedemocrats.gov/news/librarydetail.cfm?library_content_id=557

A special issue of Social Science Computer Review will highlight advances in computer-supported analysis of texts and images. Contributors are encouraged to submit original research that demonstrates innovative applications of computer-supported content analysis; review essays on tools, trends, and techniques in computer-supported content analysis; and articles that consider important theoretical and methodological issues relevant in computer-supported content analysis. Papers from a broad range of social science perspectives are encouraged. Papers may address qualitative or quantitative approaches. Papers may address texts or images of any sort, including media content, interview transcripts, and open-ended responses to survey questions. Submissions can be in the form of full papers (typically 20 to 35 manuscript pages in length) or in the form of shorter papers.

This special issue on Computers and Content Analysis will be edited by William Evans, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for Communication and Information Research at the University of Alabama. Deadline for submissions is June 15, 2006 for publication in 2007.

A web site for SSCORE can be found at http://hcl.chass.ncsu.edu/sscore/sscore.htm. See also http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=198.
Related Link: http://hcl.chass.ncsu.edu/sscore/sscore.htm

The Bloggers' FAQ on Student Blogging addresses legal issues arising from student blogging. It focuses on blogging by high school (and middle school) students, but also contains information for college students.
Related Link: http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-students.php

Using treemap visualization technology the Smithsonian Institution presents an overview of objects gathered from 1400 to 2000 and their accompanying descriptions in an easy to navigate "see and go" format.
Related Link: http://historywired.si.edu/