Jon Phipps and Diane Hillman of the NSDL Metadata Registry.

Click here to see a slideshow of 17 images from the 2006 Annual Meeting of NSDL. You can also add wisecracks and other descriptive material.

“NSDL is about the endless dream of education shared by all of us in this room,” said Kaye Howe, the Co-PI of NSDL. “What NSDL does is to pull together the tools we all create so that someone teaching the third grade in North Dakota can do a good job for his students. And this year, we are at a point of convergence.”

Kaye Howe. Click for larger image.

Howe spoke at the opening session of NSDL’s 2006 Annual Conference, where about 150 participants packed the first-floor auditorium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science headquarters in Washington, DC. She implied that the long and sometimes tortured road NSDL has followed since it launched in 2000 is, in fact, a pathway to glory. By way of elaboration she quoted the third stanza of Wallace Stevens’ “Poems of Our Climate” where the poet writes, “The imperfect is our paradise.”

“All of us who are involved in the sausage making of NSDL know how imperfect it is, but at the same time we know that it is all coming together,” she said. “What we all know in this room today is how wonderful it is to be a part of this project. Our next stage will be a gift to the nation. It is a gift that you all have given.”

The Poems of Our Climate
I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations—one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
– Wallace Stevens

As Kaye Howe quoted Wallace Stevens in the opening remarks, “The imperfect is our paradise”. In the past year working with NSDL, I have seen that paradise begin to take a stronger form with forces joining together–both interpersonal and virtual that make NSDL a more substantial tool for the user. Yesterdays Pathway meeting brought in discussions of working groups in Educational Standards, Evaluation, and Community Sign-on with ideas and people coming together in ways that will bring tangible improvement and progress to all of our efforts. My experience with the NSTA Web Seminars and working with various NSDL groups to present in these seminars as well as using tools such as Instructional Architect and this very blog platform in Expert Voices are other indications that things are happening, our work is coalescing and there is much to celebrate for this meeting. I welcome you to share in what ways your work is coming together and what else needs to be done to make further inroads happen.

“NSDL is a nexus–a place to come together and sort out issues,” stated Lee Zia, NSF Program Officer for the National Science Digital Library Program during NSDL’s Annual Meeting. He encouraged Pathways and others to work towards implementing community sign-on, resolving metadata issues, and using of common webmetrics technology in order to “tell the aggregated story of NSDL.”

Lee Zia. Click for larger image.

Reminding participants that “It is an exciting time for technology and education” he introduced Dr. Daniel Atkins, NSF Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, at NSDL’s Annual Meeting opening session on Oct. 19.
In his remarks Zia mentioned two opportunities that the NSDL community might consider:

The MacArthur Foudation has launched a 50 million dollar digital media and learning initiative to explore “The role of digital tecnology on the lives of young people” that should be of interest to NSDL projects. View a webcast that explains the new initiative at their web site.

Zia also suggested that Second Life, Your World, Your Imagination, a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents is being increasing used as an online location for the communication, commerce and education. Second Life opened to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 1,049,836 people from around the globe. The MacArthur Foundation chose to announce its new initiative live in Second Life.

(The slides supporting Dr. Atkins’s comments to NSDL are posted here.)

Dr. Atkins is the head of the National Science Foundation’s new Office of Cyberinfrastructure, a directorate-level post. He was also chair of an NSF panel that released an influential report on the subject in January 2003. The report re-framed many discussions about digital education with statements like this one: “A new age has dawned in scientific and engineering research, pushed by continuing progress in computing, information, and communication technology, and pulled by the expanding complexity, scope, and scale of today’s challenges. The capacity of this technology has crossed thresholds that now make possible a comprehensive ‘cyberinfrastructure’ on which to build new types of scientific and engineering knowledge environments and organizations and to pursue research in new ways with increased efficacy.”

Building the nation’s cyberinfrastructure (or “CI”) is a priority for education, said Atkins, but another goal of the project is to improve “rapid response to man-made issues.” The office is promoting “science gateways” such as Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD), a web portal that gives high school students, undergraduates, and the public access to a huge amount of computational power. It takes a very large, very fast computer to crunch all the variables that make an accurate forecast of a hurricane’s path. Teragrid, the computer network behind LEAD, has more than 102 teraflops of computing capability and more than 15 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage. Its headquarters at the University of Chicago provides rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks linking computers on nine campuses.

One of LEAD’s main goals is to improve storm forecasting and the public’s understanding of storms. It is one of many efforts called “Science Gateways” sponsored by Atkins’ office; several others are profiled in his slides.

Dan Atkins. Click for larger image.

The vision of Atkins’s office is to promote four broad outcomes, which he calls a “vision framework”:
* high performance computing;
* data, data analysis and visualization;
* virtual organizations; and,
* learning and workforce development.
Dozens of organizations already exist to promote these things, of course, but Atkins is pushing them from a unique fulcrum point. His office is easing the “multi-discipline, multi-investigator, and multi-institution approach that is driving the frontier of science,” he says. LEAD and other Science Gateways are research fronts that rely on massive amounts of data that must be shared and stored. They also lower the barrier for entry into these disciplines. Atkins says his office’s mission also includes producing the people who will run the Gateways and do the research.

Atkins uses an ancient scientific analogy to describe the activities his office must focus on. A Borromean Ring is a structure of three circles that are inseparable; remove one and the other two will fall apart. The three activities are “provisioning,” or the creation, deployment, and operation of advanced CI networks; research and development to enhance the social and technical effectiveness of future CI environments; and sponsoring “transformative applications” that will enhance discovery and learning.

Borromean Ring

Science directorates in many countries are pushing toward this goal of One Big Network, says Atkins. He mentioned a European science officer who said that his country is counting on massive virtual organizations to retain its world leadership in research and education.

Several NSDL people in the audience made snap-to-attention nods at the words “transformative application,” because, after all, that is our battle station on this Federal directorship. Atkins said that in his opinion, NSDL is also like a Borromean Ring – it is “a diverse and complimentary community linking people in work who have often not physically met.” The other accomplishment he noted was the applied and content contributions NSDL has made to the field of digital libraries. NSDL is “broadening the notion of library content,” he said.

Atkins identified several trends his office is watching closely. One is the Open Education/Learning Resources movement; another is the reuse, remixing, and “mashup” of existing digital resources. He also said the office is keenly interested in efforts to improve the integration of learning and discovery based on CI platforms. These efforts can come from just about anywhere. Atkins mentioned the popular game site site secondlife.com, where users create an online persona of their choosing and interact with thousands of on-line participants in fantasy societies. As the site has taken off, it has blurred the lines between fantasy and reality.

“People are making money in the real world by creating and selling virtual pieces of real estate on secondlife.com. These lots have great views of the virtual sea,” said Atkins. “So one particularly clever player bought a piece of imaginary land right along the shore that was very narrow and infinitely long, and he erected mile-high billboards on it. Then he was happy to sell the land to the people with the sea views.” It isn’t clear yet how NSDL could latch on to the passion generated by sites like these, he says, but it is worth thinking about.

The day before the opening session, representatives from 56 NSDL projects gathered to mingle and discuss their projects at the Marriott hotel across the street. These items caught our eye:
The day before the opening session, representatives from 56 NSDL projects gathered to mingle and discuss their projects at the Marriott hotel across the street. These items caught our eye:
* The BEN Collaborative was awarded a four-year, $2.8 million NSF grant last year that will allow it to increase its collection to more than 27,000 papers, images, labs exercises, and other materials. Founded in 1999 by AAAS and a few other groups as a portal for teachers in the biological sciences, BEN now includes 25 collaborators. Linda Akli, the AAAS liason to BEN, reports that a the site’s home page will have a new design that includes an improved search engine and separate options for K-12 and college teachers.
* The Macaulay Library is working with the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in Wayne County, New York to integrate animal sounds and video into classroom materials that will be distributed to Upstate teachers. Macaulay, a section of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, is the world’s largest archive of these materials. Its website allows the public to access the entire collection online. Colleen McLinn, Content Information Specialist, joined Macaulay earlier this year and is leading the classroom program.
* Math Gateway is an expansion of an earlier project called MathDL, both sponsored by the Mathematics Association of America. It is a Pathway project, which means that it receives NSDL funds to manage web content for a specific field. Lang Moore, PI of the project, reports that is features online materials from 16 partners, some of which are still in development.
* The ChemEd Digital Library is getting ready to go live. It will combine materials from three esources: the Journal of Chemical Education’s digital library, the American Chemical Society’s Education Division, and ChemCollective, a site that offers virtual versions of chemistry labs. The site aims to develop “communities of content” for different educational levels, different branches of chemistry, and different learning styles, reports John Moore of ChemEd.

One of the Annual Meeting’s panels, “Meeting Web Kids on Their Own Turf: Expanding Online Social Spaces for Scholarship,” has spawned a lively exchange elsewhere in Expert Voices. The Webkids blog explores the challenges and educational potential of “social media” such as group gaming, MySpace, and instant messaging. . A thoughtful article by panel moderator Kate Wittenberg of Columbia University frames the issue, and a report from the panel itself contains some of the hghlights. The blog also includes back-up material submitted by panelists Jennifer Groff and Eric Rosenberg of MIT’s Education Arcade, and Julie Evans of NetDay/Project Tomorrow. NSF liason Dave MacArthur, Mike Luby, Carol Morris, and others have contributed comments. You are invited to take a look and share your thoughts here.

High school physics and math teachers aren’t an endangered species yet, but they are threatened. About two-thirds of chemistry and physics teachers in U.S. high schools do not have a major or a certificate in their subjects. Only half of math teachers in grades 5 through 12 do. Two physics communities have joined to attack the problem with new strategies for sharing information, and they described their efforts at NSDL’s annual meeting.

The Physics Teacher Education Coalition supports the professional development of physics and physical sciences teachers. This summer, the PTEC website was re-designed to link to the collections of comPADRE, the NSDL Pathways partner for physics and astronomy education.. The new site also includes a database of opportunities for professional development. “The professional societies are taking up the slack,” said Ted Hodapp, director of education and outreach for the American Physical Society, one of the funders. Physics teachers often drop out because they feel isolated, said Hodapp. The PTEC/ComPADRE initiative combats this with geographic tools, including links to professional development workshops around the country and links to regionally available grants.

“Digital media is now the medium for communication into the millennia,” said Paul Berkman, Chair of the NSDL Sustainability Committee. Berkman’s group has spent several years exploring strategies that could sustain NSDL projects. He told the group that the NSDL community is like an ecosystem, and that each project should define its niche in that ecosystem: where it will find food, who its predators are, and how it might pursue symbiotic relationships with other projects. In the closing session of the annual meeting, three prominent digital library veterans shared their views and experiences with sustainability prospects on the horizon.

Kevin Guthrie helped develop Journal Storage (JSTOR.org), which offers digital storage of the archives of many scholarly journals. JSTOR was originally funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and is now supported largely by licensing agreements. Guthrie has moved on to become president of Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization seeking to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education.

JSTOR was driven by the vision of technology changing the way people use information, said Guthrie. One key to its success was transparency: when it made its index available to Google, use increased threefold. This was a big step forward but also created problems, he said, because costs were associated with increased use, and someone had to pay. “The costs were not large, but a small number multiplied by a very large number is still a large number,” he said. He recommended that NSDL sites carefully understand their costs and consider how they might change as usage increases. He also stressed that digital library artifact has to have economic value coupled with ongoing access to succeed.

Ithaka assists new organizations by researching sustainability for their communities and providing strategic information. “I would encourage all of you to understand where your value really is, and to share your value whenever you can,” said Guthrie. “This may go against your instincts, but it is important. Find out how you add value and stick to doing that.”

Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress (LOC), remembered the day in 2000 when she found out that Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) had secured $100 million for the LOC to develop digital resources for education. “We were like the dog running after a car, and we caught a bus,” she said. Campbell has since become responsible for strategic planning at the LOC, which includes cooperating with other institutions on the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP).

The goal of the NDIIP is to create a “universe of libraries to preserve and protect information over time,” said Campbell. She imagines a day when all types of educational information will be openly available and provided by a public utility, as sewer and water are provided today.

The Library focuses on humanities initiatives such as the American Memory Project, but they need to ally with digital library projects in science and math, said Campbell. She is required to report back to Congress in 2010 with successful outcomes. “You are going to need to do the same thing,” she told the audience. “And if we’re both going to be telling our stories to Congress, we ought to leverage our efforts so we can tell the best story possible.” The LOC might choose to conserve digital records that tell the story of the birth of the dot-com industry, she said, and many members of the NDSL community might be able to share sources and records that pertain. She also pointed out that conservation of digital records in the film, gaming, and cartooning industries is almost nonexistent because the major players are competing with each other. NSDL and the Library of Congress could provide a safe neutral ground where industry leaders could talk about their shared need for a permanent archive, she said.

Chris Greer is Program Director at the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which oversees the funding of NDSL. The NSF grant for NSDL was scheduled to conclude in 2006, but it has been extended to the end of 2007. Greer is responsible for digital data activities. He said that Berkman’s analogy of an ecosystem is a good one, and he is committed to finding common threads in a chaotic environment where “a flood of digital information and products are both an end and a beginning for multiple groups and organizations.”

Greer put the problem in context by pointing out that a human brain contains about 200 megabytes of information. All of the words ever spoken by human beings would amount to about five exabytes of data, which is 5000 bytes to the sixth power, he said. The total amount of electronic information available will probably exceed 10 exabytes in 2007, and another exabyte is being added every ten months. Greer said that only broad partnerships will be able to create a “digital data universe that will be understood both by specialists and non-specialists.”

Lee Zia, the NSF program officer for NSDL, continued his tradition of closing the annual meeting by sharing haiku he composes about digital libraries. Here are this year’s offerings:

Web two-point-zero;
Veni, vidi, wiki, blog;
Two-way trumps one-way!

Sacrifice control,
But gain mind share. Through usage,
Determine value.

Reuse, repackage,
Repurpose; it’s a mindset.
But recognize too!

For custom service;
Privacy as currency?
A new world beckons.

Teachable moments.
Formal blurs to informal,
And then back again.

Embrace the spectrum
From sandbox to reviewed gem,
Tap the social mind!