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News
Pathway for K-Gray Engineering Education Awarded by
the NSDL program at NSF (8/2005)
The K-Gray Engineering Education Pathway will be 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.
NEEDS Digital Library Focuses on the Future with
Phase II of the NAE Engineer 2020 Project (8/2005)
Alice Agogino, of the NEEDS.ORG engineering education digital
library, is pleased to announce new Engineer 2020 monthly themes
based on the second phase of the National Academy of Engineering's
report titled "The Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education
to the New Century." Professor Agogino is one of the co-authors. The
August theme is an overview of the second phase of the report with an
opportunity to catalog futuristic educational strategies and comment
on both phases of the report. Upcoming themes include "Hispanic
Engineers", "Mobile Learning" and "Women and Information Technology".
Learning in the Palm of Your Hand in Taiwan
April 2004 -- At the National Central University in Taiwan, Alice
Agogino, from the SMETE Open Federation, and Sherry Hsi, from the
Exploratorium, participated in an alliance for global mobile learning
called G1:1, "A Global Network of Researchers Collaborating to
Advance 1:1 Educational Computing." Building on their prior
collaboration for the workshop "Learning in the Palm of Your Hand"
(http://www.smete.org/smete/public/dimi/)),
SMETE.ORG and The Exploratorium are working to make classrooms,
museums, the outdoors, and other spaces accessible to wireless
digital libraries. SMETE.ORG is
compiling an index of mobile learning resources developed by G1:1
partners, whille the Exploratorium ( http://www.exploratorium.com)
focuses on designing wireless technologies to support nomadic inquiry
for informal science learners and educators. G1:1 was featured in
Yahoo! Finance. CBS MarketWatch, Silicon Valley Biz Ink, and PR
Newswire also provided coverage of this global mobile learning
alliance. Refer to the official G1:1
site for more information.
Participant Interaction With Digital Libraries (PIDL) Report
April 2004 -- The
PIDL Workshop was held
in Philadelphia in February. The report from the workshop edited by
Sarah Giersch, iLumina Digital Library, Eugene A. Klotz, The Math
Forum @ Drexel, Flora McMartin, MERLOT, Brandon Muramatsu, SMETE.ORG,
University of California, Berkeley, K. Ann Renninger, Swarthmore
College, Wesley Shumar, Drexel University, and Stephen A. Weimar, The
Math Forum @ Drexel is available at
http://pidlworkshop.comm.nsdl.org/. Send comments to Sarah Giersch
and Steve Weimar.
NEEDS Digital Library Focuses on the Future with
the NAE Engineer 2020 Project (1/2003)
Alice Agogino, of the NEEDS.ORG engineering education digital
library, is pleased to announce new Engineer 2020 monthly themes
based on the National Academy of Engineering's report titled "The
Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century", of
which she is one of the co-authors. The January theme of
www.needs.org was an overview of the report with an opportunity to
catalog futuristic educational strategies and comment on the report.
February focused on diversity issues highlighted in the report with a
"Celebration of African American Engineers" in honor of Black
History month. March will highlight
"Service
Learning -- Engineering in the Interest of Society." Professor
Agogino would like to encourage the continuation of this dialogue and
invites you to view and share comments about the Engineer 2020 report
and other resources. Please visit http://needs.org/needs/?path=/public/thematic/archive/1204_Eng2020/index.jhtml&.
SMETE Open Federation to Report Progress at ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
Attend the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, July 14-18, in Portland, Oregon, to hear current advances in SMETE Open Federation members' projects.
Join us at the following presentations at the conference:
Muramatsu, B., Dong, A., & Fixler, E. (2002). The SMETE Open Federation: Interoperability of educational digital libraries. To appear inProceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Pande, A., Kothapalli, M., Richardson, R., & Fox, E. A. (2002).
Mirroring an OAI archive on the I2-DSI channel. Short paper to appear in Proceedings
JCDL 2002, Second Joint ACM / IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Anan, H., Liu, X., Maly, K., Nelson, M., Zubair, M., French, J., Fox, E., &
Shivakumar, P. (2002). Preservation and transition of NCSTRL using an OAI-based
architecture. Short paper to appear in Proceedings, JCDL 2002, Second Joint ACM / IEEE-CS
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Gonçalves, M. A., & Fox, E. A. (2002). 5SL - A language for declarative
specification and generation of digital libraries. Long paper to appear in Proceedings, JCDL 2002, Second Joint ACM / IEEE-CS
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Wang, J., Agrawal, A., Bazaz, A., Angle, S., Fox, E. A., &
North, C. (2002). Enhancing the ENVISION interface for digital libraries. Short
paper to appear in Proceedings, JCDL 2002, Second Joint ACM / IEEE-CS
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
NSDL (National SMETE Digital Library):
From prototype to production to transformational national resource (2002, July). Panel to be held at JCDL 2002.
Overview of digital libraries. (2002, July). Half-day tutorial to be held at JCDL 2002.
Dorward, J., Reinke, D., & Recker, M. (2002). An evaluation model for a digital library services tool. To appear in Proceedings, JCDL 2002, Second Joint ACM / IEEE-CS
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
NEEDS to Roll Out New Look at ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition
Join NEEDS—A Digital Library for Engineering Education in booth 215 at the ASEE
Anuual Conference and Exposition, June 16-19, in Montreal Quebec, Canada. NEEDS will be demonstrating its new look and services (based upon those at www.smete.org).
NEEDS will be demonstrating Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware winners from past years.
Join us at our workshop(s) and presentations at the conference:
Tront, J., Muramatsu, B., & McMartin, F., (2002). A Community to Develop Materials for an Engineering Learning Environment. To Appear in Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference: June 16-19, 2002, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Tront, J., Muramatsu, B., McMartin, F., & Bayard, J.P., (2002). Selecting E-Learning Materials for Adoption and Adaptation. Tentative Workshop.
For more information contact Brandon Muramatsu at mura@needs.org.
AWIS Honors Appointment of 2002 Fellows
On February 17, 2002 the Association for Women in Science (AWIS)
hosted its annual reception at the meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston. The reception, which Alice Agogino of the SMETE
Open Federation had the pleasure of attending, was held in part to recognize the 2002
AWIS Fellows. A representative of the Mayor of Boston was also present to announce the
Proclamation of Women in Science Day.
Among the honored 2002 AWIS Fellows were members of our SMETE Open Federation:
Yolanda George of AAAS, Linda Mantel of
AWIS, and Jeanne Narum of PKAL.
All of the Fellows' biographies and the
Women in Science Day Proclamation may be viewed on
the AWIS web site. Following the reception, AWIS hosted, on behalf of the Global
Alliance, a Women in Leadership Workshop and a Women in Science Networking Luncheon.
For more information, visit the AWIS Web site at www.awis.org.
CNI Hosts Task Force Meeting and EDUCAUSE
Networking 2002 Conference in Washington DC
The Coalition for Networked
Information (CNI), a SMETE Open Federation Partner, will be
hosting its Spring
2002 Task Force Meeting April 15-16, 2002, at the Capital Hilton
in Washington DC. Twice a year, representatives from CNI's member
organizations gather for Task Force Meetings. The meetings are
designed to explore new technologies, content, and applications; to
further collaboration; to analyze technology policy issues; and to
catalyze the development and deployment of new projects. Registration
deadline is March 12, 2002. For more information on this meeting,
please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org or 202-296-5098.
CNI is also co-sponsoring the EDUCAUSE
Networking 2002 Conference, which immediately follows the Task
Force Meeting, on April 17-18, 2002, at the Capital Hilton. The
annual Networking conferences provide the premier forum for higher
education information technology leaders to gather to discuss policy
and practical issues associated with advancing networking
technologies and usage, and to launch and report on major
initiatives. Early registration deadline for the conference is March
19, 2002. More information and online registration is available at www.educause.edu/netatedu/events/net2002,
or contact EDUCAUSE Member Services at conf@educause.edu or 303-449-4430.
The mission of CNI is to advance the transformative promise of
networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly
communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. For
further information about CNI's work, visit their Web site at www.cni.org.
iLumina Publishes "Creating Virtual
Collections in Digital Libraries"
The iLumnia project recently published a new paper, "Creating
Virtual Collections in Digital Libraries: Benefits and Implementation
Issues." Explicitly defining virtual collections in a digital library
can benefit both users and contributors. This paper outlines the
costs and benefits for defining virtual collections and describes an
implementation of collection-level metdata in two digital libraries.
Our work suggests that component repositories of NSDL would profit by
describing their collection, and sub-collections, using a schema such
as the one we implemented. This would enable NSDL to provide a rich,
cross-linked hierarchy of virtual collections. By sharing
collection-level, rather than item-level, metadata, collections would
provide detailed resource information, presumably keeping most of
their viewership, while NSDL would provide a broad description of
resources. For further reading, download the paper: http://turing.csc.uncwil.edu/ilumina/documents/jcdl_collections_02_pdf.pdf
ENC Launches The Learning Matrix
The Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science (ENC), a SMETE Open Federation Partner, recently launched The Learning Matrix Digital Library at thelearningmatrix.enc.org.
Over 2 years ago the ENC began dreaming about building a collection of resources that would support faculty in modeling good teaching for future K-12 mathematics and science teachers. They wanted to extend ENC's influence beyond practicing K-12 teachers and actually influence the preparation of potential K-12 teachers. The Learning Matrix Digital Library is the beginning of that dream coming true.
The Learning Matrix helps faculty search for and access resources ranging from simulations and tutorials to research articles and video footage illustrating excellent teaching techniques. Imagine an introductory biology professor who wants materials to help her teach cell respiration with hands-on activities in a large lecture hall. The Learning Matrix gives her access to digital resources illustrating inquiry techniques and resources that she can use directly with her students.
Explore The Learning Matrix today.
SMETE Catalogs Merit Teacher Network (12/2001)
To test the potential for the sharing of catalog records between the Michigan Teacher Network (MTN) and the core integration project for the National SMETE Digital Library program, Kate Pittsley of MTN and Dr. Andy Dong of the SMETE Open Federation conducted a pilot demonstration. Ms. Pittsley cataloged a sampling of learning resources available at the MTN TeacherLIB digital library at http://mtn.merit.edu/ by embedding Dublin Core and GEM metadata into the
In total, 83 learning resources available from the MTN TeacherLIB digital library were cataloged at www.smete.org using this method, with the potential to catalog all of the records once the metadata is available. The records are updated on a monthly basis. Ms. Pittsley spent approximately one hour to produce metadata for each record. It takes approximately 3 seconds to either insert or update a new record, with only a simple modification to the code to add a new URL when a new record is available for harvesting.
Ms. Pittsley elected to use this custom method for sharing metadata with www.smete.org for two reasons. First, she is proficient HTML authoring and cataloging. However, she does not have the technical staff to install a metadata harvesting data provider or a federated search engine. While www.smete.org would have to write a custom program for each collection that shared metadata in this manner, Dr. Dong noted that it only took 4 hours to write the program for MTN and that he could modify the code for other collections in less than an hour. He also noted that even if he were able to harvest the metadata using a standard protocol such as OAI, he still would have had to customize the harvester to translate the controlled vocabulary used by the MTN catalog records to the controlled vocabulary used by www.smete.org. In all, the total time investment by both the collection (metadata provider) and the harvester using a custom metadata harvesting method might be equivalent to using a standard protocol such as OAI.
In future tests, MTN and www.smete.org plan to create a means for MTN to track the utilization of their learning resources cataloged at www.smete.org. Additionally, Ms. Marcia Mardis is working to complete the cataloging of the records so that they may be harvested and re-cataloged at www.smete.org.
MERLOT and SMETE Collaborate to Develop Peer Review System
MERLOT - the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and On-line Teaching, and NEEDS - the National Engineering Education Delivery System, are working together to implement the first collaborative peer review system for reviewing learning materials. Combined, NEEDS and MERLOT catalog over 1000 digital learning resources for engineering. The newly formed Engineering Disciplinary team, led by co-chairs Ed Perry, University of Memphis and Joe Tront, Virginia Tech, are establishing a set of review criteria for engineering learning materials. The review process is scheduled to begin in February 2002. If you are interested in learning more about the engineering peer review activities or would like to join the peer review team, please contact Dr. Flora McMartin, mcmartin@smete.org.
iLumina Announces a New Digital Library Site for Teaching
and Learning Resources
The iLumina project, a SMETE Open Federation Partner, recently released its digital library at www.ilumina-dlib.org. iLumina takes advantage of the Web to provide a growing digital collection of small-scale undergraduate teaching materials developed by faculty for science, mathematics, technology and engineering (SMETE) education. iLumina provides free download of materials and easy contribution of new digital resources. Visit the Ilumina digital library and find out more about the project.
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