Planning and proposing evaluations to support project success

Health sciences librarians have an active interest in community health information outreach projects [1–8]. Successful community partnerships are guided by each partner clearly defining goals. Accomplishing these goals requires time and personal contact to develop trust, active engagement of all partners, and careful planning [9, 10]. The investment required to develop partnerships makes project sustainability a desired outcome. The academic health sciences library exists to support the educational mission of the institution. By collaborating with other academic units, the library can meet its educational goals while building the sustainable relationships necessary for successful outreach projects. At the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the Library of the Health Sciences (LHS) and College of Nursing (CON) developed an outreach project that directly supports the mission of the university while strengthening relationships between the library, CON, and surrounding community [11]. As part of a core course in the undergraduate nursing curriculum, CON faculty supervise students in clinical rotations at two Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) clinics in nearby neighborhoods, engaging them in the challenges and rewards of community practice. In the fall of 2005, CON and LHS faculty saw an opportunity for outreach. The resulting Spanish Access to Literature/ Uso Directo (SALUD) Public Health Information Pilot Project provided education on evaluating and using online health education materials by leveraging community health nursing students and existing relationships between these organizations. This paper describes the project's core activities with an emphasis on the project's techniques for sustainability.

For the past two years we have been operating a remote instrument educational project called Bugscope. Bugscope is an educational outreach project that provides access to an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) for K-12 classrooms. While the operational aspects of the project require a minimal amount of staff time, the information management for the project is difficult for a small microscopy research group to support without a significant allocation of resources away from the group’s principal research goals. in an effort to alleviate this problem we have begun, in the past five months, to develop a software toolkit called ‘Information Technology for Outreach Projects’ (ITOP) - using the Bugscope project as a test bed. The goal of ITOP is to make it practical for academic research groups to provide scientific resources for educational outreach projects by automating many of the administrative and data handling tasks.

Learning in an immersive digital theater

Prepared for a CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation) Strategic Education Governance Learning Seminar, this working paper analyses an ongoing reform in Austria to change the traditional sector-specific “supervision” of different school types to a system of quality management of all schools in the region and to introduce a new external school evaluation body. The paper identifies four pertinent areas for lasting success of the reform: a new focus on quality management and monitoring; a restructuring of existing sector-specific school supervision bodies; creating a shared vision of quality and educational goals; and ensuring reliable and useful knowledge. Employing a complexity perspective to governance, the paper highlights that long-term sustainability of the reform requires a compelling narrative clarifying how school supervision supports education improvement and how supervision fits into wider education policy. The analysis further underlines the principle of co-creation in developing quality frameworks and establishing the methodology for the new external school evaluation body; and also for school leaders and school supervisors to drive the development of their new professional identities. Finally, to provide useful knowledge for schools and the system, the new external evaluation body should focus on the improvement of teaching and learning.

Abstract. One of the primary activities of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology; INGV) is the production of resources concerning educational and outreach projects in geophysics and natural hazard topics. This activity is aimed at transferring, periodically, results at the forefront of ongoing research to the public through an intense and comprehensive plan for scientific dissemination. Over the past 15 years, graphic and visual communication have become essential tools for supporting institutional and research activities. In this paper, we describe successful INGV team experiences resulting from a close relationship and collaborative work between graphic designers and research scientists. The main goal of the projects devoted to the general public, through the creation of a museum exhibition or the production of descriptive brochures, is to support scientists in conveying their message and making concepts fruitful, easier to understand but also fully enjoyable thanks to the emotional involvement that images may generate. Through a careful composition of signs and images, and through the use of different visual tools (colours, form and lettering) on different media (print, video and web), the graphics and editorial products together create a strong INGV-style identity, making it easily recognizable in any educational and outreach project. A full project product package might include a logo or other artwork, organized text and pure design elements such as shapes and colours, which serve the purpose of unifying the whole set. Colour is used not only to help the project logo to stand out from the international overview but, in our case, also to generate a unifying return across all INGV sections. A recent and highly stimulating experience concerned the creation of edu-games, specifically designed for scientific dissemination, through a close collaboration between INGV graphic designers and their reference scientific community. The edu-games were designed as an effective combination of educational content and playful communicative aspects, leading the young players to learn while having fun.

This article examines the benefits of including a trained external evaluator on educational research projects and programs. The argument is presented that, when projects or programs impact educational policy or decision making, assessment and evaluation should be guided by a systematic plan implemented by a trained evaluator.

Highlighting the need for teacher education programs to respond to rapidly diversifying societies, this article reports a qualitative metasynthesis of intercultural outreach projects in music teacher education, conceptualizing these projects as a “pedagogy of interruption.” Results show that such outreach projects interrupt the individualistic frame of music teacher education, the known difference, the logic of teaching, and the understanding of what intercultural teacher competence is, rather moving toward letting the context teach. The complex relational work involved in intercultural outreach projects can be seen to establish spaces for framing learning within professional self-reflexivity, embracing uncertainty and trusting relational becomings through an investment in the political and moral aspects of teacher education and intercultural theorization. The article argues that intercultural outreach projects and theorization can be taken as a healthy test for contemporary music teacher education to rethink what competence and its own education is for in the 21st Century.

BackgroundAppropriate supervision, along with availability of an effective system for monitoring and evaluation, is a crucial requirement to guarantee sufficient coverage and quality of malaria vector control procedures. This study evaluated the efficacy of self-assessment practice as a possible innovative method towards achieving high coverage and excellent quality of larviciding operation in Iran.MethodsThe research was conducted on the randomly selected rural health centre of Kanmbel Soliman with 10 staff and 30 villages, in three main steps: (i) assessment of effectiveness of larviciding operations in the study areas before intervention through external assessment by a research team; (ii) self-assessment of larviciding operations (intervention) by staff every quarter for three rounds; and, (iii) determining the effectiveness of applying self-assessment of larviciding operations in the study areas. Two toolkits were used for self-assessment and external evaluation. The impact of self-assessment of larviciding operations was measured by two indicators: percentage of missed breeding habitats and cleaned breeding habitats among randomly selected breeding sites. Moreover, the correlation coefficients were measured between self-assessment measures and scores from external evaluation. The correlation coefficient and Mann Whitney test were used to analyse data.ResultsFollowing the utilization of self-assessment, the percentage of missed breeding habitats decreased significantly from 14.23% to 1.91% (P <0.001). Additionally, the percentage of cleaned breeding habitats among randomly selected breeding sites increased from 66.89% to 95.28% (P <0.001). The external evaluation also showed significant effects of self-assessment in performance of vector control; the maximum effect of intervention were seen in an action plan for monitoring and evaluation of larviciding operations at field level, geographical reconnaissance for the registration of breeding habitats and worker skills related to larviciding.Before intervention, the results of self-assessment practice were compatible with external evaluation in 76.3% of 139 reviewed reports of self-assessment. After intervention, the findings of self-assessment and external evaluation were similar in the vast majority of reviewed reports (95%).ConclusionThe self-assessment tool seems to be valid and reliable in improving effectiveness of larviciding operations. Furthermore, the result of self-assessment is more compatible with external evaluation results if it would be applied frequently. Therefore, it can be used as an alternative assessment technique in the evaluation of larviciding operations in addition to traditional assessment methods.

Jeong-Gil Woo investigates the prototypical Confucian concept of education and the educational relationship according to Confucius’ Analects. It is marked with characteristics, such as deep respect for the human being, relationship ethics, and the spirit of dialogue, ren (仁, benevolence) and junzi (君子, noble person) as a goal of education, the correspondence of words and action as a basic principle of educational practice and interaction, and xiuji (修己, self-education and self-transformation) as the ideal form of the educational relationship. In this chapter, there is a particular focus on the dialogical nature of Confucius, which is directly related to the conceptualization of original Confucian education and the relationship as a dialogical one, which may lead one to rethink that Confucian education only advocates a hierarchical and authoritative system. In reading the original text of the Analects, Confucius is found as an educator and not as a manager of an educational project, where he tries to make others into junzi with his hierarchical authority, but as a companion, motivator, or partner in dialogue as well as a role model in the process of becoming a junzi. The goal of Confucian education is not to force someone to change, but encourage him or her to pursue an educational ideal of xiuji within the educational relationship.

Mitigation of Climate Change Through Outreach Projects in Higher Education

Designing and applying an approach to software architecting in agile projects in education

Introduction: Eleven years ago, Moffitt Cancer Center developed Project LINK (Leaders In New Knowledge), a program that created mentoring relationships between established researchers and high school and college level students. The success of this program in aiding underrepresented minorities through the pipeline to careers in cancer research has lead to the establishment of LINK-ET (Emerging Technologies), an undergraduate training program in clinical proteomics that also exposes the students in health-related community education and outreach projects. Methods: The foundations of LINK-ET are mentorship, teamwork, and collaboration. The students received 4 months of intensive training with lectures and laboratory assignments in proteomics, an emerging technology that combines protein separations, mass spectrometry, and bioinformatics for protein characterization. Each student then transitioned into different labs to learn cancer biology for continuing implementation of proteomics addressing biological and clinical research questions. This provides a supportive and collaborative environment whereby the students receive mentoring by expert scientists. Students also attend research group meetings, Proteomics Journal Club, special lectures, and monthly Project LINK meetings. This gives them an opportunity to participate in professional and scientific career development with guest speakers and career counselors. In addition, the four LINK-ET participants (2 juniors and 2 seniors) also volunteer with community events and other educational activities organized by the Tampa Bay Community Cancer Network, a community based participatory project that establishes partnerships between MCC researchers and local organizations that share a common goal of impacting health disparities. Results: The students constantly express how Project LINK-ET has provided them with intensive hands-on research activities and strengthened their basic science skills. During the training they provided written lab reports detailing their understanding of sample preparation, instrumentation, and data analysis in proteomics. Each student will present research at a national conference and co-author educational articles describing the training activities as well as manuscripts that will be submitted to peer reviewed journals. The impact of the community education and outreach has strengthened their commitment to cancer research. Conclusions: This training program, LINK-ET, has combined elements of undergraduate training in science using classroom techniques and lab partnering. Also, the combination with education in health disparities and involvement with community outreach is inspiring the students to be more involved and keeps them attuned to the specific needs of different communities. This integrative program has strengths that motivate the students to continue their development in cancer research related careers. ∗This presenting postdoctoral fellow is supported by an ARRA supplement to the NCI Cancer Center Support Grant awarded to Moffitt (3P30 CA076292-11S6 PI WS Dalton) to create a training program for underrepresented undergraduate students in clinical proteomics Project LINK (Leaders In New Knowledge -Emerging Technologies) that also emphasizes education in health disparities and community outreach. Citation Information: Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2010;19(10 Suppl):B29.

The Indian earthquake problem is well known. About 60% of India's land area is considered prone to shaking of Modified Mercalli intensity VII and above (IS:1893-2002). In fact, the entire Himalayan belt is considered prone to great earthquakes of magnitude exceeding 8.0, and in a span of 53 years, four such earthquakes occurred: 1897 Assam, 1905 Kangra, 1934 Bihar-Nepal, and 1950 Assam-Tibet (Table 1). As seen in Table 1, there have not been any M > 8.0 earthquakes in India since 1950. However, a very large number of deaths occurred in the M 6.4 Latur (1993) and the M 7.7 Bhuj (2001) earthquakes. Of these, the Latur earthquake occurred in an area considered aseismic and placed in the lowest seismic zone (zone I; prone to intensity of shaking V or less on the MM scale) at that time (IS:1893-1984). These examples clearly underline the huge earthquake risk that most parts of the country face. View this table: TABLE 1 Significant Past Earthquakes in India Earthquake engineering developments started rather early in India. For instance, development of the first seismic zone map and of earthquake-resistant features for masonry buildings took place in the 1930's, and formal teaching and research in earthquake engineering started in the late 1950's (Jain and Nigam, 2000; Jain, 2002). Yet not enough progress could be made toward earthquake risk reduction due to a variety of reasons, including those associated with a typical developing economy ( e.g., relatively poor implementation at all levels; priority to provide basic amenities such as food, shelter, and medical care to a huge population). Over the years, no serious efforts were made to involve professional engineers in the agenda of seismic safety. As a result, the professional engineers in the country started looking at earthquake engineering as a superspecialty to be tackled by academics and experts. Moreover, …

Visualization of all types of data is a highly effective tool used by researchers to gain insight into natural phenomena and to communicate their findings. It is also an increasingly popular means of presenting large scientific datasets to the general public in informal educational settings such as museums and planetaria. Visualization has appeared in many forms and in many cultures throughout digital history and contributes to the evolving visual language of science. Dr. Donna Cox and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, collaborate with science teams, writers, producers, educators, and media distribution professionals on content designed to engage a wide range of audiences. In the past 8 years alone, her collaborative educational and outreach projects have produced science narratives featuring data visualizations that have been viewed by more than 45 million people worldwide. Cox leads an NSF-funded project to create scientific visualizations and then test audiences' understanding of the phenomenon that is being presented. Large-scale computational data present unique visualization challenges for producers of high-resolution, production-quality 3D IMAX movies; feature films; and museum fulldomes. In this keynote, Cox will provide a visual feast of major projects, including new digital fulldome museum shows and award-winning IMAX films.

At Amaldi7,which was held in Sydney in 2007, the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC), which oversees the Amaldi meetings, decided to hold the 8th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves at Columbia University in the City of New York. With this decision, Amaldi returned to North America after a decade.The previous two years have seen many advances in the field of gravitational-wave detection. By the summer of 2009 the km-scale ground based interferometric detectors in the USA and Europe were preparing for a second long-term scientific run as a worldwide detector network. The advanced or second-generation detectors had well-developed plans and were ready for the production phase or had started construction. The European–American space mission, LISA Pathfinder, is progressing towards deployment in the foreseeable future and it is expected to pave the way towards gravitational-wave detection in the millihertz regime with LISA. Plans were developed for an additional gravitational-wave detector in Australia and in Japan (in this case underground) to extend the worldwide network of detectors for the advanced detector era. Japanese colleagues also presented plans for a space mission, DECIGO, that would bridge the gap between the LISA and ground-based interferometer frequency range.Compared to previous Amaldi meetings, Amaldi8 had new elements representing emerging trends in the field. For example, with the inclusion of pulsar timing collaborations to the GWIC, gravitational-wave detection using pulsar timing arrays was recognized as one of the prominent directions in the field and was represented at Amaldi8 as a separate session. By 2009, searches for gravitational waves based on external triggers received from electromagnetic observations were already producing significant scientific results and plans existed for pointing telescopes by utilizing gravitational-wave trigger events. Such multimessenger approaches to gravitational-wave detection also received special attention at the meeting.For the first time in the history of Amaldi conferences, plenary and contributed sessions were held to transfer ideas and experience gained with gravitational-wave science inspired education and outreach projects. Additionally, Columbia University faculties working in frontier fields, which currently may not have a direct connection to the field of gravitational-wave science, gave enthralling presentations in the form of a `wake-up' lecture series.The meeting also facilitated the exchange of scientific results and new ideas among all members of gravitational-wave experiment collaborations and the gravitational-wave theory community. Additionally, future directions in gravitational-wave detection were discussed in a special session dedicated to the Gravitational Wave International Committee Roadmap.A highly entertaining and inspiring public talk entitled `Songs from space: black holes and the Big Bang in audio' was given by Janna Levin and it attracted over 300 young and old science enthusiasts from and around New York City.This special issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity (Volume 27, Number 8, 2010) is published as the proceedings of Amaldi8. It contains the overview articles by invited plenary speakers, and some of the highlights of the conference as selected by session chairs and organizers. Other Amaldi8 talks and posters appear in the refereed issue of the electronic Journal of Physics: Conference Series. This issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity and the Journal of Physics: Conference Series issue will be electronically linked.The conference organizers gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Columbia University in the City of New York, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the United States National Science Foundation.We would like to thank the Gravitational Wave International Committee for their scientific oversight, the Local Organizing Committee for program selection, and the session chairs for thoughtful delivery of conference goals and enabling many lively discussions that are much needed for the development of our frontier field. We would also like to thank the hard work of Columbia University Physics Department administrators for handling some of the practical aspects of the organization. Finally, a team of students (Jonathan Berliner, Rutu Das, David Fierroz, Alyssa Miller, David Murphy and Keith Redwine) provided assistance behind the scenes. Their hard work, practical ideas, and dedication are greatly appreciated. We are also grateful for Keith Redwine for his help in organizing the Journal of Physics: Conference Series proceedings articles.Finally, we would like to thank over 310 participants for their interesting and lively contributions that ultimately made the conference a success.