Digital Library For Earth System Education Research Articles

Tamara Shapiro Ledley Receives 2013 Excellence in Geophysical Education Award: Citation

It gives me great pleasure to cite Tamara Shapiro Ledley for the AGU Excellence in Geophysical Education Award “for her outstanding sustained leadership in Earth systems and climate change education.” Tamara has shown an ongoing commitment to bridging the scientific and educational communities to make geophysical science knowledge and data accessible and usable to teachers and students and by extension to all citizens. She works extensively with both the scientific and educational communities. She began her educational work in 1990 as the leader for weather and climate in my Teacher Research program at Rice University. She continued as the lead for atmospheric sciences in our projects Earth Today and Museums Teaching Planet Earth, which introduced her to the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP Federation). She has served many roles at ESIP, including creating the Standing Committee for Education and serving as vice president. ESIP recognized her many accomplishments with its President's Award in 2012. At TERC her education and outreach efforts have blossomed. She was the lead author of the “Earth as a System” investigation of the GLOBE Teacher's Guide. She was a member of the original Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Data Access Working Group in 2001, where the idea for a cookbook‐like resource to facilitate the use of Earth science data by teachers and students resulted in her leading the development of the “Earth Exploration Toolbook” (EET), which allows teachers to easily access and use real scientific data in the classroom. Her efforts were recognized with the EET being awarded Science Magazine's Science Prize for Online Research in Education in 2011.

An Optimistic Read on Digital Libraries

In the News story “NSF rethinks its digital library” (Special Section on Education & Technology, 2 January, p. [54][1]), J. Mervis captures the uphill struggle digital libraries have faced as they try to sustain funding and gain visibility among educators and students. However, the picture the article paints of sustainability in general and the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) in particular is too pessimistic. The process by which the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) assumed responsibility for the DLESE collection is attracting a good deal of attention through articles, presentations, and grants addressing models of sustainability for digital efforts. The advantages of curated digital libraries are clear to many users. DLESE's collections of Earth science materials, now managed by the NCAR Library, have been selected by educators and scientists specifically because they are scientifically accurate, grade-level appropriate, and effective for teaching. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which operated the technical arm of DLESE and continues to run the NSDL Resource Center, is very proud of the impact of these digital library efforts. Although DLESE has lost its NSF funding, the open-source DLESE technical infrastructure underpins initiatives at NASA, NOAA, DOE, and scientific data centers and digital libraries from Britain to China. It is notoriously difficult to demonstrate the impact of educational innovations, but a current project with Denver Public Schools leveraging DLESE collections holds promise for helping us evaluate the value of digital library collections in transforming teacher practice and learning outcomes. In many ways, NSF's investment in digital libraries has been transformative. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.323.5910.54

Digital library for Earth system education adds pedagogical links

Effectively teaching Earth science requires not only a broad understanding of geoscience topics but also strategies and tools to help students learn. For example, a teacher planning a lesson on the hydrologic cycle should know students' common misconceptions (e.g., groundwater flows as underground rivers), how studying the water cycle can contribute to students' understanding of systems and processes, how to leverage students' firsthand experiences with water fluxes and reservoirs to inform class discussion, and how to assess what students know and understand about the water cycle.Such knowledge of how to teach effectively within a discipline is called “pedagogical content knowledge,” or PCK. A new service within the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) seeks to help educators teach more effectively by providing them with access to relevant PCK as they prepare to teach a given topic, issue, lesson, or idea. DLESE (http://www.dlese.org) is a Web‐based portal providing access to curriculum materials and information resources for teaching and learning about the Earth and its environment.

The DLESE Community Review System: Gathering, Aggregating, and Disseminating User Feedback about the Effectiveness of Web-based Educational Resources

The Community Review System (CRS) of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is intended to help educators seeking excellent and appropriate digital resources, and resource creators seeking recognition. The CRS gathers web-based feedback from educators and learners who have used DLESE educational resources, plus specialist reviews by science and pedagogy experts. This information is used to identify exemplary resources to be showcased in the DLESE Reviewed Collection. Detailed, but anonymous, feedback is provided to the resource creator to encourage improvement of the resource. To help potential users of the resource decide whether (and how) to use the resource, we also web-disseminate four kinds of aggregated information from the review process: Teaching Tips, recommendations about whether the resource is effective with specific learner populations, a graphic summary of the quantitative feedback from the community reviews, and an Editor's summary.

Meta-Design of a Community Digital Library

The community digital library has emerged as a recent evolution in the development of digital libraries. A community digital library is distinct through having a community of potential users define and guide the development of the library. In this article, we present how the geoscience community has worked to develop The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) in the light of recent work in the area of meta-design, the design of the design process. The development of DLESE is described utilizing a conceptual framework developed from the analysis of a variety of open source projects.

Creating Reusable Educational Components: Lessons from Dlese

Reuse of educational materials is integral to many educator tasks, from designing a course to preparing for a lab or class. We are studying the reuse of educational materials in the context of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). DLESE is a community-owned and governed facility offering high-quality teaching and learning resources for Earth system education. Our studies build on a cognitive framework that posits that people engage in three cyclical processes—location, comprehension, and modification—when reusing resources from large digital repositories. Our formative evaluations and cataloging experiences in DLESE suggest that the ‘findability’ and reusability of community-created digital educational resources is highly dependent on the presentational and structural design of the resources themselves. Educational resource designers often do not develop components with reuse in mind, making it more difficult or impossible for other educators to find and use their material. We share the results of these studies to help educators create digital materials that are more easily shared and used by others. For example, we recommend that all resources clearly state the creator's name and contact information; relevant copyright restrictions; the most significant date for the resource (specifying creation or revision); and the intended grade level.