The team that made the popular eSkeletons project has launched eLucy, a new site that supports Lucy’s American tour. “Lucy” is a partial skeleton of a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis. Evolutionary biologists consider the bones among the most important clues to the origins of the human race. Lucy almost certainly walked upright and had several other human characteristics but possessed a small, ape-like brain. Since she was discovered in 1974, she has come to represent a crucial link between people and other primates.

Lucy now and then

The six-year tour has been controversial because the bones are extremely fragile, and several scientists involved in the discovery of Lucy have said that the bones should not be moved from their permanent home at the National Museum of Ethiopia. But the exhibit’s opening at the Houston Museum of Natural Science last September drew huge crowds, and its six-year tour of the U.S. will be an important opportunity for teachers of comparative anatomy.

Using the format of Eskeletons, eLucy.org lets visitors compare the bones of Australopithecus with those of a chimpanzee and a modern human. Eskeletons uses interactive Quicktime movies, cross-sectional views, pop-ups, and other online tricks to describe the bones of a human and 11 other species, including apes, lemurs, a marmoset, and a bushbaby.

The launch version of eLucy is simpler, but several activities for students and teachers are already available, and more are planned.

Many colleges and universities have responded to their students’ passionate concerns over environmental challenges such as global warming by pledging to become carbon neutral and taking other environmentally responsible steps. Sierra magazine recently looked at the nation’s colleges and picked Ten Schools That Do It Right, based on everything from clean-energy purchases and green-building policies to bike facilities and dorm food.

Picks included huge statewide systems such as the University of California (number 4) known for traffic woes at ten locations that serve 214,000 students. In spite of current commuter hassels, the University of California has pledged to increase its use of low-to zero-emission vehicles by half by 2010. On the small but significant end of the impact scale is Warren Wilson College (number 3) that provides 850 students with opportunites to experience a campus that runs a “sustainably managed farm, garden, and forest that provide food and lumber for the campus; streetlamps that reduce light pollution; and community service as an integral part of the curriculum.”

Author Jennifer Hattam stresses that colleges and universities are in a key positions to make a difference. She states, “High-profile schools have a bully pulpit and the financial resources to lead by example with their actions and investments. Research institutions are primed to develop technological solutions. And even small community colleges are educating tomorrow’s leaders. If students start their adult lives in a culture of sustainability, they just might take that ethos with them wherever they go.”

Read the “Go Big Green” article here.

View “Ten Schools That Do It Right” here.

Washington D.C., Nov. 6, 2007 — The National Science Digital Library (http://nsdl.org) Core Integration team at Cornell University led by Dean Krafft presented an overview of NCore, an open source suite of technologies and standards that power the National Science Digital Library’s (NSDL) core infrastructure, at NSDL’s Annual Meeting held in Washington D.C. November 6-8, 2007. View the presentation.

NCore technologies and standards replace NSDL’s original metadata records-based data paradigm allowing for greater flexibility in collaborating and creating context around library resources. In the initiative’s first phase, completed in January 2007, NSDL Core Integration successfully implemented existing Library services on top of NCore—a change that was largely invisible to users. Now, NSDL is leveraging what the Fedora-based NCore platform has to offer by introducing next-generation library services and collaborative tools.

MANAGING AND MAINTAINING DIGITAL LIBRARIES WITH NCORE

NCore is a general platform for building semantic and virtual digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications. DLESE, the Digital Library for Earth Science Education (http://dlese.org) ported their existing infrastructure to NSDL using NCore. By overlaying their data model on top of the NCore model, developers enabled specialized DLESE services to continue without loss of functionality, and to co-exist alongside of, but independent from, NSDL.

The NCore API was used to build the DLESE index by reading DLESE metadata from the Fedora-based NSDL Data Repository (NDR), using the NDR API, and then building the index. The key technical point in this step was to extract the required metadata from NDR objects.

The DLESE Search Service is run from the Index, and is used to power the DLESE library search and browse functionality. Use of the NSDL Data Repository as the primary metadata repository required no modifications to DLESE Search Service. The indexes and search service remain the same, which means the DLESE Library interface and all other interfaces that use the NCore service continue to operate without modification.

INSIDE NCORE

The NCore platform consists of a central repository built on top of Fedora, a data model, an API, and a number of fundamental services such as full-text search or OAI-PMH. Innovative NSDL services and tools that empower users as content creators are now built on, or transitioning to, the NCore platform. These include: the Expert Voices blogging system (http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/);the NSDL Wiki (http://wiki.nsdl.org); the NSDL OAI-PMH metadata ingest aggregation system; the OAI-PMH service for distributing public NSDL metadata; the NSDL Collection System (NCS), derived from the DLESE Collection system (DCS); the NSDL Search service, and the OnRamp content management and distribution system (http://onramp.nsdl.org).

Because NCore is a general Fedora-based open source platform useful beyond NSDL, Core Integration developers at Cornell University have made the repository and API code components of NCore available for download at the NCore project on Sourceforge. Over the next six months, NSDL will release the code for major tools and services that comprise the full NCore suite on SourceForge.

The NCore project aims to support NSDL’s continued growth as a semantic and virtual digital library providing open source educational cyberinfrastructure services and tools in support of teaching and learning, while meeting the needs of new, existing, and evolving digital libraries. For more information contact the NCore team at Cornell.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0227648, 0227656, and 0227888. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Teachers’ Domain has added 100 new resources mostly adapted from source material in the NSDL. The new resources update their Life and Physical Sciences collections as part of the site’s NSDL Pathways grant. Accompanying the resources are 10 new lesson plans. WGBH selected and developed these materials with the assistance of the curriculum development firm BSCS, Inc. and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The media assets came from a wide range of sources, including museums such as the Exploratorium and the American Museum of Natural History; universities such as Nebraska, Utah, Colorado, and Rutgers; organizations such as AAAS, ChemThink, and Texas Parks and Wildlife; and public television sources such as Dragonfly TV, Curious George, Design Squad, and NOVA scienceNow. More

This replica of the PS-1 (Sputnik-1) hangs in the Cosmonautics Memorial Museum in Moscow.

Fifty years ago on October 4, the Soviet Union launched its prosteishy sputnik, or simplest satellite. It stayed in Earth’s orbit for 22 days, sending back a signal to announce that the space age had begun. Sputnik only weighed about 80 kg, but it hit this country like a flying sledge hammer, writes NASA scientist Homer Hickham, who grew up dreaming about space travel in a small West Virginia town. Hickham’s eloquent speech on the history and future of the space program was a highlight of a May 2001 NASA symposium, the proceedings of which are titled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward” .

The most comprehensive resource on Sputnik is RussianSpaceWeb , an independent site maintained by journalist Anatoly Zak. SpaceWeb’s Sputnik materials include technical descriptions, first-person accounts from Russian scientists, accounts of the political impact in the USSR, and much more.

Many more Sputnik links can be found on the web page of the NPR talk show Science Friday , which devoted an hour to Sputnik’s 50th anniversary on September 28. Go here for a selection of American reactions to Sputnik, including a contemporary newsreel and discussions of the launch’s impact on science education. A highlight is a NASA recording of the sound the satellite made as it orbited the earth. Its distant high-pitched “beep” sounds eager and friendly, more like a high school science project than a threat to national security.

Kimberly Lightle, Principal Investigator for the Middle School Pathway developed by The Ohio State University College of Education and Human Ecology, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation International Polar Year (IPY) Program (DRL-0733024) to collaborate with teams from Ohio State University, National Science Digital Library Core Integration, the Byrd Polar Research Institute, and the Center for Science and Industry (COSI) Columbus to develop an online magazine entitled Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears: Integrating Literacy and IPY into K-5 Classrooms.

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears aims to maximize the impact of International Polar Year research on elementary classrooms by capturing student interest and fostering the ability of K-5 teachers to integrate polar concepts into their teaching by 1) selecting, augmenting, and contextualizing quality learning resources from the National Science Digital Library, the Ohio Resource Center, and other IPY-funded projects; 2) creating 20 issues of a multimedia cyberzine with a combined focus on inquiry-based science and content-rich literacy learning; 3) developing communication, production, and cyberinfrastructure tools that amplify resource discovery and access to resources, and increase the ease of reuse and repurposing of content; 4) disseminating deliverables through presentations, publications, and push technologies; and 5) evaluating the impact of project deliverables on teachers and students.

Lightle came up with the idea for the project because she noticed that while appealing images of polar bears and penguins are popular culture icons appearing in everything from blockbuster movies, soft drink commercials to zoo advertising, people of all ages seem stumped by the riddle: “Why don’t polar bears eat penguins?” Both animals are associated with snow and ice and the poles; but few people seem to be aware that penguins and polar bears live at opposite ends of the earth. Lightle believes that this lack of simple knowledge about where these well-known animals live reflects a shallow understanding of polar environments.

The Polar regions are sometimes viewed by scientists and the general public as the “canary in a coal mine” of global warming as reports about shrinking ice and threats to animal populations are reported in the news. Among the goals of International Polar Year research as envisioned by the U.S. Committee to the International Polar Year is to bring scientists from many countries and multiple disciplines together to make objective sense of investigations and information about the polar regions while educating and exciting the public. The last such initiative occurred 50 years ago during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year that involved 80,000 scientists from 67 countries.

An interdisciplinary team from Ohio State University (OSU), College of Education and Human Ecology; the Ohio Resource Center (ORC) for Mathematics, Science, and Reading; the Byrd Polar Research Center; COSI (Center for Science and Industry) Columbus; and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration team at Cornell University and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) will work together to accomplish the goals of this project. Content and education specialists from OSU, ORC, Byrd Polar, and COSI will be responsible for creating content as well as adapting and contextualizing existing content. The NSDL Core Integration team will be responsible for the technology tools and dissemination strategies and activities. The Evaluation and Assessment Center at Miami University, Oxford, OH will conduct all project evaluation.

This project will increase the science and polar literacy of students and teachers by increasing the amount and quality of science teaching that occurs in K-5 classrooms. A limited set of highly generative and powerful discipline specific concepts, such as Ice, Conservation, Biomes, and Populations, will be the focus of each issue of the cyberzine. The project will be interdisciplinary in scope and occur during the International Polar Year (IPY) period. It will also develop the cyberinfrastructure that will allow other developers to tap into a wealth of IPY resources through the development of an IPY Learning Objects Repository.

All content of the cyberzine will be modeled after the research generated through the NSF-funded Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading project. New content will be developed based on developmentally appropriate, learning progressions. Elementary grades teachers are the focus of the project. The elementary grades are a critical time in child development to establish important foundational process skills.

One of the departments in the cyberzine will address ideas and strategies to ensure equity for all students, with a focus on addressing the needs of underrepresented groups (e.g., students with special needs and those from linguistically and culturally diverse communities). The project takes advantage of existing National Science Digital Library (NSDL) 2.0 semantic web infrastructure. Project deliverables will be disseminated through presentations, publications, and digital libraries. The results of all evaluation efforts will be shared nationally through the cyberzine, conferences, and presentations. For more information, contact Kimberly Lightle (lightle.16@osu.edu) or Carol Minton Morris (clt6@cornell.edu).

The 2007-2008 NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar Series begins on Sept. 20 with a presentation aimed at motivating your students to consider careers in math and science. The FunWorks is a digital resource library designed to encourage middle school students to explore math and science careers by showing that while some subjects are perceived as “geeky,” they have real-world connections to art, games, music, sports, and other topics of interest to kids. What does physics have to do with how Venus Williams holds her tennis racket? What does designing video games have to do with ratios and proportions in algebra? Register today and find out!

Since 2005 NSDL/NSTA Web seminars have been helping teachers connect with new resources, meet educational professionals from across the country, virtually, and learn from science, technology, engineering and mathematics experts. NSDL joins the NSTA Web Seminar Series once again for the 2007-2008 school year with a full lineup of fascinating speakers and topics. From subjects including careers in science to evolutionary biology, these free, 90-minute live seminars connect you to NSDL’s experts in education and research as well as with featured digital resources–straight from your desktop!

The series begins on September 20th with Sarita Nair-Pillai, Project Director at the Education Development Center, and will feature resources from The Fun Works, a digital resource library designed to encourage middle school students to explore math and science careers.

Find out more about the NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar Series here. Seats are limited. Register for these free upcoming seminars, or any in the series today.

“I made it from scratch” is a phrase that conjures up images of homemade baked goods and cozy kitchens. The idea of “Coding a computer program from scratch,” on the other hand, entered the technology lexicon to describe a job usually cooked up on-the-fly. While the MIT Media Lab is not exactly a warm kitchen, they are giving Scratch away to help young people ages 8 and up develop 21st century learning skills with an easy-to-use programming tool.

Scratch makes it simple to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art–and share these creations on the web. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Not all programmers think making programming easy is a good thing as a tongue-in-cheek comment on Slashdot may indicate, “Pfft. You whippersnappers have it easy! I had to wire my logic gates by hand. . . That was after I mined the copper to make the wires! Plus, I had to use an exercise bike to generate the electricity to power the thing!!!” Some educators are in favor of eliminating the drugery mystique from programming. David J. Malan, a lecturer in Harvard University’s continuing-education program, uses Scratch to teach adults how to program. He was recently quoted in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, “To this day, there’s a stigma and a fear factor” around computer science. Eliminating that stigma or making computer science or programming more accessible to a broader audience can only help potentially recruit additional students to the science.”

Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation, and MIT Media Lab research consortia.

This computer-generated rendering represents aspects of the natural phenomena of radiosity: “When a surface has a reflective light component, it not only shows up in this image, it also shines light at surfaces in its neighbourhood. And vice-versa. In fact, light bounces around in an environment until all light energy is absorbed (or has escaped!).” From Blender, a free open source 3D content creation suite, documentation.

NSDL partner the Exploratorium features representations of museum exhibits in their digital library. Online visitors are advised, “These versions in most cases are not adequate replacements for the real experiences that you will have if you are able to visit us.” Seeing is believing when it comes to experiencing the real world. Linking that experience to teaching and learning is what Chad Dorsey, Science and Educational Technology Specialist at the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance, will explain to teachers on June 19, 2007. Register here for the free upcoming NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar entitled Using Digital Phenomena and Representations to find out how to use real-life phenomena to explain the natural world to 6-9 grade students aligned to learning benchmarks and instructional criteria.

Resources for the seminar will be from the NSF-funded NSDL PRISMS Project. PRISMS has built a collection of reviewed online phenomena and representations that have been analyzed and annotated by reviewers using content alignment and instructional quality criteria based on the AAAS/Project 2061 Curriculum Materials Evaluation.

The seminar is designed for educators of grades 6-9,including pre-service teachers, science education specialists, and curriculum developers.

This video segment adapted from NOVA scienceNOW reviews the debate over the definition of a planet. Take a test drive of the open access Teachers’ Domain resource What is a Planet here.

On June 1, 2007 Teachers’ Domain http://www.teachersdomain.org/ announced the launch of Open Educational Resources–video segments, interactive activities, and lesson plans in earth science, engineering, life science, and physical science that are downloadable, sharable, and re-mixable. Whether you download them to your own computer, share them with your students and colleagues, or edit them to create your own educational media, Teachers’ Domain is proud to provide high-quality materials to help you learn and teach!

The Teachers’ Domain Collections are FREE for anyone to use and are comprised of carefully chosen and edited online resources, multimedia learning tools, and corresponding lesson plans from NOVA and other award-winning PBS programs. Currently providing more than 1,000 resources, a third of which will now be available as Open Educational Resources, Teachers’ Domain covers all key topics in science and is now expanding into the humanities. To see Teachers’ Domain’s new Open Educational Resources in action, please click here to view an exciting sample resource entitled What is a Planet?.

Teachers’ Domain is an online educational service with two related components–collections and courses–that help teachers enhance their students’ learning experiences and advance their own teaching skills. It’s free and easy to register. Find fresh new ideas to get your students excited and engaged in learning!

Funding for presenting Open Educational Resources on Teachers’ Domain is provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Teachers’ Domain is the National Science Digital Library Pathway http://nsdl.org/about/?pager=pathways to Multimedia Resources for the Classroom, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Teacher’s Domain: multimedia resources for the …