In last year’s Speak Up 2007 Report, Project Tomorrow’s annual survey of teachers, parents, and students focusing on technology in schools, teachers expressed a growing need for online professional development programs. The survey showed a 29% increase in teacher interest in online programs from the previous year. The National Science Teachers Association’s Learning Center offer teachers of all grade levels with training by experts in their fields. NSTA’s upcoming online course, Energy, Get the Facts So You Can Teach It, begins September 30th. This 5-week course offers asynchronous learning with live web sessions consisting of a virtual classroom, a weekly discussion posted on the course listserv, and additional course materials. For more from Project Tomorrow, sign up for their upcoming webinar, Learning in the 21st Century: A Trends Update on September 17th.

The NSDL Web Seminar Fall 2008 Series begins September 25th with another year of online professional development programs in partnership with the National Science Teachers Association. These 90-minute seminars allow educators to interact online with NSDL community experts and other educators across the nation. In conjunction with next year’s International Year of Astronomy, NSDL opens this year’s series with Celebrating Astronomy: A Star’s Story. Learn the latest in scientific study about the life cycle of a star by registering for this free seminar. NSDL will continue its 2008 Fall Series with a focus on the polar regions: Physical Science From the Poles (October 29th) and Energy and the Polar Environment (November 13th).

On Thursday, July 31, 2008, Digital Promise, a fund to keep America competitive in this digital century by transforming education, workforce training, and lifelong learning, was passed by both the U.S. House and Senate as part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. It is expected to be signed into law by President Bush. Digital Promise will establish the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund based on the principles of Digital Promise. The Trust’s goal is to transform America’s education at all levels through the development and use of revolutionary advanced information technologies comparable to those that have already transformed the nation’s economy, its communications system, media, and the daily lives of its people.

The Trust will enable the nation’s schools, universities, libraries, museums, and public broadcasters to reach out to millions of people in inner cities and remote regional areas, no matter how poor or deprived, in the U.S. and throughout the world, with the best of the educational and informational content now locked inside their walls. It will support the research and development of new models and prototypes of educational content, taking full advantage of the Internet and other new digital distribution technologies. For example, the Trust will commission pre-competitive research and fund the development of prototypes to:

- Demonstrate computer simulations that let learners tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, or practice marketing techniques, thus making it easier to grasp complex concepts and transfer this understanding quickly to practical problems.

- Demonstrate sophisticated help systems that provide accurate answers to questions using a combination of artificial intelligence and live operators.

- Demonstrate new communication tools that could enable learners to collaborate in real-time on complex projects and ask for help from teachers and experts from around the world.

- Demonstrate learning systems that could adapt to differences in student’s personal interests, backgrounds, learning styles, and aptitudes.

- Demonstrate tools that provide successively more difficult challenges with appropriate levels of scaffolding that motivate the learner while avoiding frustration or boredom.

- Explore learning opportunities present in persistent, online learning environments.

- Provide continuous measures of competence—integral to the learning process—that can help teachers work more effectively with individuals and leave a record of achievement that is compelling to students and to employers.

- Demonstrate new tools that could allow continuous evaluation and improvement of the learning systems themselves.

- Digitize America’s collected memory stored in our nation’s

universities, libraries, museums and public television archives to make these materials available anytime and anywhere.

Join the Digital Promise Coalition here.

Issue Five of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears magazine, Water, Ice, and Snow, uses the polar regions to better understand the water cycle as well as states and changes of matter. While the weather at the beach may be steamy right now, the August issue looks at the cool blue and white of forming, moving and melting glaciers, ice fields, and icebergs in beautiful photographs that accompany excellent content and resources for educators. The issue includes (read more):

• Science and Literacy content knowledge

• Misconceptions and assessment tools

• Expository articles and differentiated text for use with students

•  A virtual bookshelf of children’s literature

• Polar research

Of course that’s not all - and we hope you’ll explore the issue in its entirety! But in addition to our wonderful content, we have new exciting features to help you make the most of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears!

A custom search feature allows you to enter keywords and search just the magazine and blog.

An Issue Archive allows you to view and access all past issues of the magazine.

A Browse by Column feature allows you to view the same column across all magazine issues. For example, you could view all of the Virtual Bookshelves at once - saving you the time and trouble of navigating between individual issues.

Finally, we need your help! We are asking visitors to take two short online surveys. One, accessible from the magazine home page, asks questions about your purpose in visiting the magazine and your use of various web tools. At the end of this survey, you can enter a monthly drawing for a $50 Amazon gift certificate!

The second survey is designed to provide feedback on our most popular article, Science and Literacy Lessons and Activities. After reading the article, click on the link (at the top and bottom of the article) to take the short (8 question) survey.

We hope you’ll enjoy this latest issue of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears!  

NSDL has streamlined collection browsing at NSDL.org to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Browse collections alphabetically or through subject gateways that include: Biological and Health Sciences; Engineering, Computing, and Technology; General Science and STEM; Geosciences; Mathematics; Physical Sciences; and Social Sciences. Within each of these broad categories, users may browse by audience: collections whose items have classroom utility are found in the For Educators and Learners category; collections without classroom application are found in the For Researchers and Professionals audience grouping. New Collections also displays collections according to date of accessioning, so newest collections are listed first.

NSDL’s flagship Pathways collections that are affiliated with specific disciplines or audience groups appear in a bold font in the collections browse feature. Selecting a specific collection name brings up search results for that entire collection. Pathways-related resources are also featured on the right hand side of NSDL.org search results as “Relevant Results form NSDL Pathway Partners”.

A new National Science Digital Library (NSDL) scholarly publication, Classic Articles in Context (CAC), was launched in April 2008 with an atmospheric science theme: “Climate Change and Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming: A Selection of Key Articles, 1824-1995, with Interpretive Essays.” Each issue of Classic Articles in Context presents significant scientific questions of the Twentieth Century using landmark and important legacy papers. As a follow-up to this well-received first issue illustrating science as a process that builds, and often turns, on discovery and replication that is expressed in the archival literature of empirical findings, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is pleased welcome Academic Editors Dr. Mahesh Mahanthappa, University of Wisconsin and Dr. Peter Levy, New York University, who will edit the next two CAC issues in chemistry and physics.

For the CAC Chemistry Issue, Dr. Mahesh Mahanthappa of the

University of Wisconsin has begun work on “Polymers: From Small Molecules to Useful Macromolecular Materials” (http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/PALE:ClassicArticles/Polymers)*, a collection of primary works in polymer chemistry, spanning over

100 years. Mahanthappa will assemble the collection as part of his NSF CAREER Award.

The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a

Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

The polymer chemistry issue will begin with studies illustrating the skepticism among many scientists early in the twentieth century over the notion of large “macro” molecules and call attention to the next several decades examining milestones such as the discovery of ethylene oligomerization by nickel salts with trialkylaluminums in the 1950s, and synthesis of stereoregular polypropylenes using rationally designed catalysts in the late 1980s.

In Physics, Dr. Peter Levy, Professor of Physics at New York University, has begun assembling an issue devoted to Giant Magnetoresitance (GMR) entitled “An Idiosyncratic History of Giant

Magnetoresitance”

(http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/PALE:ClassicArticles/GMR)*. This is the research area of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. Dr. Levy will examine the development of a model for the ‘anomalous’ electrical resistivities of the ferromagnetic transition-metals. This seminal work of Sir Neville Mott in the 1930s will serve as a point of origin for Levy to present studies up through the 1980s, when Nobel Laureates Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert independently achieved GMR through the use of multilayers of magnetic and nonmagnetic metals. Levy will then find work from the 1990s through the early years of the present decade that consider investigations such as injecting spin currents into otherwise nonmagnetic materials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene.

Look for the launch of the next two CAC issues–Physics, September

2008 (or early fall 2008) and Chemistry, December 2008 (or late

fall 2008).

*Please note that the URLs cited for these issues are

contact Mike Luby, Director, Publisher Affairs, National Science Digital Library.

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) has been a functioning digital library since 2002 when, among other developments, the Nova Scotia Drama League agreed to transfer the “NSDL.org” domain name. During the Education session at the recent Joint Conference on Digital Libraries on June 17, 2008, Richard Furuta, Texas A&M University, chaired a series of presentations that highlighted aspects of NSDL’s technical infrastructure and work with educational discipline communities. Later a panel of NSDL users and developers led a discussion entitled, “NSDL: Past, Present, Future” that focused on how NSDL has fulfilled its mission “to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education,” and what direction NSDL will take in the future.

Paul Conway, University of Michigan, moderated the “NSDL: Past, Present, Future” panel that featured Dave MacArthur, GoH LLC, Kim Lightle, Ohio State University, Kathleen Koch, NSDL Middle School Portal, and David Yaron, Carnegie Mellon University.

Dave McArthur credited Lee Zia, NSDL’s NSF Program Officer, with guiding the project from it’s inception in 2000 and reminded the audience that the NSDL was not always the way it looks now at NSDL.org. Basic infrastructure and technical standards were developed in the early start-up phase from about 2000-2003. NSF provided funding for collections and research. NSDL Core Integration and NSDL projects developed library services. The first iteration of a web site at NSDL.org was launched. “Getting the stuff up and running” was the task at hand and work with teachers and students was postponed as the Library of educational resources continued to build. The NSDL library research track was significant as a continuation of Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 1 and Phase 2 (DLI1 and DLI2) research. About 40% of NSF-NSDL funded projects contributed to content, services and community building at NSDL.org in this early phase.

From 2004-2007 NSDL was refurbished and reorganized with the launch of new infrastructure based on Fedora open source repository software. The Collections track morphed into a new track called Pathways, which emphasized leveraging NSDL for different Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) discipline communities. During this phase 70% of NSF-NSDL funded projects contributed directly to NSDL.org. Outreach and communications efforts increased as NSDL moved beyond prototyping and into classrooms. More projects went into the field and gathered data about how NSDL was being used.

Currently, using the tools and services that power NSDL, NCore technology and standards for creating a dynamic information layer on top of library resources, provides STEM education projects with a “grand and deep” opportunity for personalization. McArthur pointed out that a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation for implementing a specialized educational digital library system for a big urban school district might cost about $2M. Using NCore brings the cost down to about a quarter of that.

Kim Lightle has been associated with NSDL since 2000. “We view NSDL as a platform,” said Lightle, “We have been able to do amazing things with very little money using NSDL technology and services.”

She demonstrated examples from the NSDL Middle School Portal (MSP) that has been online for three years. Last month the MSP recorded 85,000 page views. “Using NSDL tools brings a high Google ranking to all content,” Lightle explained. “We are in the business of providing context around significant science and math themes by harvesting, highlighting, and repackaging content in our Explore in Depth online publications.” All 2,500 NSDL resources that have been augmented by MSP have been put back into the NSDL data repository so that others may benefit from additional resource information.

MSP hosts several NSDL Expert Voices blogs and features the RSS from their blogs on their web site: http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/connectingnews/;

http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/middle-school-math-science/,and; http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/polar/.

Some postings are ‘quick takes’ on popular topics that are noted on analysis of search logs–Middle School Portal editors write short items based on what people are looking for and feature the RSS feed from the blog on their homepage.

Additionally NSDL outreach services and access to professional personnel have made it possible to create an entire online magazine–Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears–that would not have been otherwise possible financially or logistically.

Kathleen Koch explained that she has made use of Middle School Portal (MSP) resources in the large, urban North Carolina school district where she helps coordinate curriculum development for teachers in 32 middle schools. Urban schools have many challenges–providing support for young and new teachers, and achieving teacher retention are among them. At each grade level students learn integrated science and math and teachers often lack content expertise. Koch, who is a classroom teacher, is trying to make their jobs easier by providing resources for instruction. Using district access to commercial Riverdeep education software, she links MSP resources. “Teachers think this is ‘one-stop shopping,’” she says.

“Making learning relevant during a tricky age (early teen years) is key because they lose interest quickly,” she said.

—

Dave Yaron, an associate professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University and Principal Investigator for the NSDL Chem Collective project (read Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article here), believes that digital libraries can help solve the problem of uninteresting and rote curricula at high school and undergraduate levels because digital libraries are cognitive tools that help novices construct expert mental models. By the time he retires, he would like to see some evolution with respect to changes teaching and learning methods, particularly in chemistry education “from the bottom up”.

Yaron believes that certain educational practices will increase the use of digital libraries in high school and undergraduate classrooms:

- Changing math procedures that have been defining what chemistry is so that the ChemCollective Virtual Lab Simulator, for example, is relevant as a teaching tool (7,000 teachers have seen it; 200 are using it; a handful have contributed to improving the tool).

- Developing more scenarios like Mixed Reception about how chemistry (and other scientific discipline-related activities) are related to events in the real world.

Related NSDL JCDL 2008 Papers:

From NSDL 1.0 to NSDL 2.0:Towards a Comprehensive Cyberinfrastructure for Teaching and Learning, David McArthur, Lee Zia

NCore: Architecture and Implementation of a Flexible, Collaborative Digital Library, Dean Krafft, Aaron Birkland, Ellen Cramer

The Open Source Physics (OSP) project and the ComPADRE digital library are pleased to announce the creation of a new web-based collection of OSP resources. The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena. The materials in the collection connect computational simulations, models, and tools with curricular resources. Registered users of the library (registration is free) can build personal collections of materials, comment on resources, and submit materials for consideration by the OSP Editors.

The OSP collection can be viewed at http://www.compadre.org/osp. More information about the Open Source Physics project is available at http://www.opensourcephysics.org/. OSP is supported in part by NSF grants DUE-0126439 and DUE-0442481, and ComPADRE is supported in part by NSF grants DUE-0226192 and DUE-0532798.

Last week in Seattle The Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) division of Special Libraries Association (SLA) Conference featured a presentation from NSDL’s Physics and Astromony Pathway (comPADRE) PI Bruce Mason who teamed up with NSDL’s science librarian blogger Pat Viele. Mason and Viele co-presented a poster about comPADRE, and also later at the Physics Round Table discussion where they enlisted science librarians to help spread the word about comPADRE–and all of NSDL–by attending regional meetings such as the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers to let them know that NSDL services and resources are not only available, but useful in Physics instruction.

Viele also reported on the American Physical Society Conference held in College Park, Maryland in January 2008 “Graduate Education in Physics: Which Way Forward.”

Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom, a collection of essays edited (in the “Wild, Wild Wiki”) by Robert Cummings and Matt Barton, is described as, “An indispensable and engaging guide to using wikis in the classroom.” A look at the table of contents includes titles that range from, “Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaborations” to “Wiki as Textshop: Constructing Knowledge in the Electronic Classroom.” In “Wikis in the Classroom: A Taxonomy” author Mark Phillipson writes, “Wikis carry with them the DNA of the open source movement, for better and for worse: they are infinitely modifiable, adaptable for any number of locally conceptualized ends, resistant to fixity. Such open-ended fluidity can only be tamed in the classroom by pre-defined purpose.”

When most people think of wikis, the first thing that comes to mind is Wikipedia though there are many other examples including NSDL’s Wiki. Experimentation with this fairly transparent content creation and co-editing technology and how to best use it in classrooms has fueled debate among those who believe that wikis either help or hinder students’ ability to interact with one another, express their opinions, and complete assignments online. The essays presented by Robert E. Cummings and Matt Barton in Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom are from various points of view that present a variety of use cases and opinions on what works in college classrooms.

Robert E. Cummings is Assistant Professor of English and Director of First-year Composition at Columbus State University. He also serves as

the Writing Specialist for CSU’s Quality Enhancement Plan, assisting teachers across campus in their efforts to maximize student writing in their curriculum.

Matt Barton is Assistant Professor at St. Cloud State University, Department of English. He is an Assistant Editor of Kairos and an Associate Editor of Kairosnews.