Summer 2007 Session: Education DAAC
Doing an education DAAC:
Building a persistent archive for quality earth system data for educators.
The problem: data discovery is difficult enough, so when you find the data you need and use in the classroom, shouldn't this be kept in a place where you can find it again next year? There are now significant investments in the services that help make data useful for educators. DataSheets (http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/browse_sheets.html) at Carleton (SERC) are model sites for data access by teachers, so are the Earth Exploration Toolbook chapters (http://serc.carleton.edu/eet). All of these services depend on data that are served by third-parties. When the data link breaks or the data changes, the service is impaired. DLESE and the DLESE DAWG (Data Access Working Group) have articulated the need for a persistent archive for a small selection of data resources of particular value to educators (at all levels). See also: "Building Earth Data Resources into DLESE." DAWG whitepaper
On part of this idea is to facilitate data fusion efforts in education. Certainly, there are efforts at distributed data provision that would allow educators to access data from several servers. This also multiplies the potential for one or more of the datasets to be offline or changed at a later date. So the archive would also bring together multiple data sets to illustrate the complex earth system phenomena of particular value in teaching earth system science.
The availability of a persistent archive of high value data can also help drive laboratory class development in secondary schools, inform AP class curricula, and create the content for standards.
All good things come from data that doesn't go away!
Who should attend?
- educators looking for data
- curriculum developers using data
- digital library people wanting to handle data
- data providers looking to serve education users
Contact: bruce caron [bruce AT tnms.org]
LEAVE YOUR NAME BELOW so we know how many folks are interested:
Bruce Caron
Lin Chambers and/or MY NASA DATA team members
Carol Meyer
Tamara Shapiro Ledley
Brian Rogan
Carla McAuliffe
Margaret Mooney
Rob Raskin
Bruce Wilson (possible, depends on if sessions are all day)
Stefan Falke
Post your comments here:
BEW -- One of the possible ways of addressing one aspect of this need would be Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). A DOI would provide an invariant resource locator to a relevant dataset, even if the underlying location moves.
