The council expects to be in Copenhagen for the 15^th Conference of the Parties (COP15) with its call to action.  In a press release, ICC Chair Jim Stotts says, “Our message to global leaders is simple: there is no more time to waste.” He adds, “…the Arctic is at the epicentre of climate change. Inuit traditions and subsistence practices have already been assaulted.”

In the document, the Inuit ask the COP15 to –

– ratify an agreement to stabilize greenhouse gas at 350 parts per million, ensuring temperature increases “well below 2 degrees Celsius.” 

– designate avoidance of climate change impacts on the Arctic as a benchmark for effectiveness of future agreements. The Inuit note that the Arctic environment often is the first to show the effects of changes in global climate and ocean systems.

– incorporate traditional knowledge of native peoples into future assessments of climate change and future policy decisions.

– create an international fund, financed by G20 countries, to help those affected by current and inevitable changes.

– adopt a mechanism to commit adaptation assistance to those most affected by climate change, including vulnerable populations living in developed states.

– support green-energy technology to foster economic well-being among vulnerable populations.

Learn how Western scientists are now tapping into traditional knowledge of native peoples to assess the impacts of climate change in the October issue of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears. The article “Fruitful Collaboration: Western Science and Native Ways of Knowing”describes the work of researchers who are seeking the input of indigenous peoples in the Arctic regions.

Also in Copenhagen. Along with delegations from the world’s major economies, the tip of an iceberg will make an appearance at COP15 in Copenhagen next month. Greenlandic artist Inuk Silis Høegh created the 68-foot tall sculpture and installed it on the outside of a cultural center called North Atlantic House in the city’s harbor.

The image is made of a collage of photographs of icebergs taken along the Greenland coast. The country hopes to draw attention to Greenland’s position at the center of the climate debate.

According to the Siku News,an iceberg with a tip of this size would have a volume of some 30,000 cubic meters (85,000 cubic feet) and would measure well over 100 meters (328 feet) from tip to base.

Involved in the center’s work are educators and scientists from the Anchorage School District and state agencies such as the Alaska Ocean Observing System, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and Center for Cross-Cultural and Rural Development, and others. The web site offers links to resources, including lesson plans.

This fall, COSEE Alaska launched SEANET, a network of scientists, educators, communicators and community members interested in promoting ocean research and climate change literacy.

SEANET has a social networking site — http://oceanseanet.ning.com/ — open to everyone.

COSEE is funded by the National Science Foundation with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Twelve centers are located on coastal regions throughout the United States.

With over 900 repository implementations worldwide, DuraSpace Solution Communities seek to increase resources, connections, skills and ideas by engaging people at all organizational levels in order to improve open technologies and strengthen the communities that use them. By providing leadership, tools and coordination DuraSpace Solution Communities bring tech savvy decision-makers together around critical community issues to establish the conditions in which collaboration can flourish to provide durable access to our digital heritage.

Thorny Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Alliances, and Val Hollister, Director of Community Development, DSpace Project, will offer a free “All About Repositores” web seminar on Monday November 23, 2009 entitled “Take a New Look at DuraSpace Solution Communities” to introduce new tools and resources for Solution Communities (register here: http://www.education-webevents.com/). They will explain how to get involved in grassroots efforts to meet the challenges of rapidly changing information environments faced by knowledge organizations everywhere. They will also discuss the Solution Community bottom-up organizational approach based on the theory that higher levels of order will emerge from complex systems under the right conditions.

Solution Communities in Data Curation, Preservation and Archiving, Scholars Workbench, and Small Archives have begun investigations into how to leverage collective interests and priorities. To support Solution Community efforts, DuraSpace has developed a suite of tools and offers free access to anyone with an interest in participating. Individuals will find several ways to engage with Solution Communities including wikis (http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Home) that contain a growing knowledge base, and mailing lists for specific communication around Solution Community topics. In addition, the new DuraSpace social network pilot in Crowdvine (http://duraspace.crowdvine.com/) features informal groupings for each Solution Community so individuals can connect around their particular interest.

ABOUT DURASPACE

DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org) is a not-for-profit organization that is the result of joining Fedora Commons and DSpace, two not-for-profits established to sustain their open source repository software. The two organizations combined forces to pursue a common mission and to expand their offerings into cloud computing and scholarly/scientific “cyberinfrastructure” for universities, libraries, and research institutions, archives, museums, NGOs, and more.

DuraSpace is committed to providing technologies and services that help ensure that our digital heritage is accessible over the long term.  Accordingly, the DuraSpace technology portfolio inherently addresses the issue of durability of digital content. Durability is not only essential for high integrity access to digital information, but it is also a necessary pre-requisite to the process of digital preservation as expressed in the DuraSpace organizational byline, “Open technologies for durable digital content.”

Duraspace will lead two breakout sessions–one focused on the DuraCloud service, and one about DuraSpace Solution Communities that provide leadership, tools and coordination around critical community issues to establish the conditions in which collaboration can flourish to provide durable access to our digital heritage.

The day will focus on finding topics of mutual co-operation in the areas of Repositories, Digital Libraries, Data Curation, Management of eScience content, and Long-Term Preservation. Experts from Harvard University, Columbia University, MIT, Sun Microsystems, and other local institutions will discuss their projects and new technologies, including open storage, sustainable preservation architectures, and new reference architectures.

Agenda items will include:

Sun PASIG focus an global trends

Sun in education

Use cases presented by local institutions

Sun technology overview and reference architecture

Breakout sessions discussing partner solutions, Storage Archive Manager (SAM) and Infinite Archive System (IAS)

Sun’s PASIG (http://www.sun-pasig.ning.com/) community provides support for organizations challenged with preserving and archiving important research and cultural heritage materials. Founding members include The Alberta Library, The British Library, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University and other leading global libraries and universities. This is the second PASIG-related regional conference directed at fostering local collaboration. Ideas and input from this conference will be incorporated into the semi-annual global PASIG events.

Space is limited and people must register to attend: https://www.suneventreg.com//cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2965

Exploratorium exhibit floor

In the United States, about one college student in 25 is visiting from another country. Almost 672,000 international students were enrolled in American colleges and universities in 2008-09, an all-time record. “While I don’t actively recruit from the international community, I’m delighted when prospective volunteers find us through our website.  They can make really great volunteers,” says Deirdre Araujo, manager of volunteer services at San Francisco’s Exploratorium.  “It’s broadening whenever you can work with someone from another culture, and whatever their skill-set, it can be a great addition to the experience for our visitors.  But you have to be very careful before you say yes to an international volunteer.  You need to make sure they have a good support system, or you might end up dealing with their problems.”

Volunteering turned out well for Laura Pacchioni, a student from Nice, France who needed to do an internship during a study-abroad program.  “I was in the states for two months, and I stayed at a friend’s house when I worked at Exploratorium,” she writes. Pacchioni created a guided tour of the gardens around the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, working with a forester. “I learned that the Natives chewed willow barks and twigs to relieve headaches – and it was later discovered that these are rich in salicylic acid, one of the main ingredients of aspirin,” she says.  “Something like that came up nearly every day. It was an amazing experience.”

Oriane Scholler, Exploratorium volunteer

On the other hand, the folks who manage science museum volunteers also have lots of horror stories to share concerning international volunteers. Some have shown up for work carrying all their luggage because they don’t have a place to stay any more. Others run out of money but can’t earn any legally because their tourist visas don’t allow them to hold paying jobs.  And one volunteer feared the secret police of her home country so much that she refused to wear a name tag, which attracted the attention of the museum’s security guard. You can imagine the rest.

“I ask a lot of questions before I say yes to any volunteer, and it’s no different when they come from other countries,” says Araujo.  “The best situations are when the volunteer is connected to a host organization that can vouch for them and step in if there’s a problem.”  Many of the Exploratorium’s international volunteers come from Bay Area language schools that provide students with a safety net.  “If they are on their own, you need to make sure right off the bat that they have a good, stable source of room and board,” she says.  “Make sure you know about their visas, and what they would do in an emergency.”  Many visitors ignore their tourist visa restrictions and assume they will find under-the-counter jobs – so Araujo makes her position on this issue clear. “I let them know that I will not serve as a reference, help them if they run out of money, or give them health care,” she says.  “And it’s important for any volunteer to give you a good reason to hire them. You need to know that there’s a good match for them in your institution.  The more they know about your operation coming in, the better it’s likely to be for both sides.”

Of course, none of these problems are likely to crop up if the volunteer is virtual.  “The Exploratorium has relationships with museums all over the world,” says Araujo.  “Recently we were contacted by a prospective volunteer in India who wanted to work with our hands-on make-and-take activity program called Physics of Toys.  We happened to have a regular volunteer who was planning a vacation in India.  They shared information online and planned to follow up with an in-person visit, and the guy was able to adapt those activities to his local audience.”

The 21 photographs in the climate change display are from Gary Braasch’s book Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World. (Univ. of California Press, 2007, 295pp.). Photojournalist Braasch has been documenting climate change for a decade. Each photograph is captioned, explaining where it was shot and the effect of rapid climate change. Among them are photos of a polar bear on an ice-free beach in Alaska, villagers caught in Bangladesh floodwaters, and the retreating Athabasca glacier in the Canadian Rockies.

Images in the companion teaching exhibit are from the children’s book How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate co-written by Lynne Cherry and Braasch (Dawn Publications, 2008).Videos and photos from the Young Voices on Climate Change series show middle school students doing projects to reduce carbon footprints in their communities.

The exhibits, free and open to the public, are in the gallery at AAAS headquarters, 12th and H Streets, N.W., in Washington, D.C. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. The exhibits run through March 15, 2010, and then are expected to travel to museums after March 2010.  

Find a preview of photographs from the kids’ exhibit at http://www.earthunderfire.com/pages/exhibit2.html

According to a press release from the National Science Foundation, researchers generally agree that the likely cause of glacier melting is the rise in global temperatures. Changes in cloudiness and precipitation may play a role, but in recent years temperature changes appear to be more significant.

Twenty-six per cent of the ice on Mount Kilimanjaro in 2000 is now gone. Lonnie Thompson, a paleoclimatologist with the Byrd Polar Research Center (and one of the first researchers to be featured in Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears), can use 2000 as a baseline because he amassed data from six cores drilled on the mountain’s ice fields in that year.

Data show that the glaciers are shrinking in size and thinning rapidly. Thompson says: “If you look at the percentage of volume lost since 2000 versus the percentage of area lost as the ice fields shrink, the numbers are very close.”

The summits of both the northern and southern ice fields atop Kilimanjaro have thinned by 1.9 meters (6.2 feet) and 5.1 meters (16.7 feet), respectively. Thompson cites a small glacier, a remnant of the once enormous ice cap, that has thinned as much as 50 per cent since 2000. At that rate he predicts: “In the future, there will be a year when Furtwängler is present and by the next year, it will have disappeared. The whole thing will be gone!”

Thompson and his team published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Glacier loss on Kilimanjaro continues unabated .

Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is the highest peak in Africa and a triple-peak volcano. Some 20 volcanoes are nearby.

Glaciers on other famed mountains are exhibiting the same thinning and retreating. To bring worldwide attention to the impact of global warming on the glaciers of the Himalayas, the government ministers of Nepal will hold a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest, earth’s highest peak.

Scheduled for late in November, the meeting will take place at a base camp where mountaineers begin their final ascent of Everest. Cabinet members will fly to the camp.

A government spokesperson said the glaciers are melting at an alarming rate and creating lakes that could flood villages. The glaciers feed some of the region’s largest rivers—the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Brahmaputra—and irrigate farmland in Tibet, Bangladesh and India.

The Nepal event and a government meeting held underwater in Maldives highlight those countries’ concern about the effects of global warming on glaciers and their efforts to make other nations aware before the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen, December 7-18. (The Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, is the world’s lowest lying country.)

According to a BBC news story, the Maldives government is hosting a conference in mid-November for about 10 nations vulnerable in different ways - African countries threatened by desertification, mountain ones whose glaciers are melting, large Asian ones affected by floods and typhoons, and other island nations like itself vulnerable to rises in sea level.

Santa Barbara, CA Researchers at the University of California have partnered with dozens of other universities and agencies to create DataONE (http://dataone.org), a global data access and preservation network for earth and environmental scientists that will support breakthroughs in environmental research.  DataONE (Data Observation Network for Earth) is one of two $20 million awards made this year as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) DataNet program. The collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often incompatible scientific data.  Resulting studies will range from research that illuminates fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, the Department of Computer Science and Genome Center at UC Davis, and the California Digital Library at the UC Office of the President are integrally involved in the NSF DataONE initiative.  Across these UC partners, the several million dollar award will drive advanced research and data acquisition, storage, mining, integration, and visualization for DataONE. The resulting computing and processing “cyberinfrastructure” will be made permanently available for use by the broader UC community and international science communities. DataONE is led by the University of New Mexico, and includes additional partner organizations across the United States as well as from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia.

“Scientists have spent hundreds of years collecting environmental data – measuring temperature, counting fish and butterflies,” says Stephanie Hampton, Deputy Director of NCEAS. “We already know quite a lot, when you estimate the volume of scientific data that must exist out there, but the challenge is to find those data sets and then put them together in a manner that helps to address the important questions for science and society. DataONE will be that portal for environmental data.”

The DataONE team will study how a vast digital data network can provide secure and permanent access into the future, and also encourage scientists to share their data. The team will help determine data and data citation standards, as well as create the tools for organizing, managing, and publishing data.

As one of five DataNet collaborations envisioned by the NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.htm), DataONE will build a set of geographically distributed Coordinating Nodes that play an important role in facilitating all of the activities of the global network.  The initial three Coordinating Nodes will be at UC Santa Barbara (housed at the Davidson Library), at the University of New Mexico, and at the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“Institutions have made extensive investments in infrastructure for managing data at their local institutions and in discipline-specific consortia, but these systems generally don’t interoperate,” says Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics Research and Development at NCEAS. “DataONE will provide a critically needed interoperability layer that will allow scientists from diverse domains to collaborate on pressing environmental science challenges.”

Scientific data integration and management also occupies computer science researchers who develop methods and tools that support all stages of the data life cycle. “Effective annotation and integration of data, and efficient management of data lineage information are hot research topics in the database and scientific workflows communities,” says Bertram Ludaescher, professor of computer science at UC Davis, whose team specializes in scientific workflow and data integration technologies, and storage and querying of data provenance.

Libraries have traditionally played a critical role in preserving and providing access to scholarly materials and recently have begun to focus on the complex challenges associated with managing scientific data.  “Libraries don’t have the capacity to address these challenges individually.  We need to partner with researchers, information technologists, and domain specialists to address these complex problems” says Patricia Cruse, Director of the UC Curation Center at the California Digital Library.

DataONE includes experts from library, computer, and environmental sciences explicitly to bridge these worlds and to develop an infrastructure to serve science for many decades to come.

About the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

NCEAS was established in 1995. The organization has hosted more than 4,000 scientists from over 50 countries, and supported more than 430 collaborative projects in ecology and related fields. NCEAS scientists develop new techniques in informatics, and apply general knowledge of ecological systems to specific issues, such as the loss of biotic diversity, global change, and sustainability of marine ecosystems. NCEAS is among the top 1 percent of 38,000 institutions evaluated for scientific impact in environmental research. NCEAS is funded by the National Science Foundation, the state of California, the University of California and numerous other donors.  For further information contact Stephanie Hampton, Deputy Director, NCEAS, at hampton@nceas.ucsb.edu or (805) 892-2505 or Matt Jones, Director of Informatics Research and Development, NCEAS at jones@nceas.ucsb.edu.

About the UC Curation Center and the California Digital Library

The UC Curation Center (UC3) of the California Digital Library (CDL) was established in 2009.  UC3 is a central preservation and curation service provider addressing the system-wide needs of the 10 campuses of the University of California, one of the pre-eminent public universities of the world.  The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve.  For further information contact Patricia Cruse, Director, UC Curation Center, at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu or 510/987-9016.

About Professor Ludaescher

Bertram Ludaescher is professor at the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Genome Center, both at UC Davis. Work in his Data & Knowledge Systems (DAKS) lab is focused on scientific workflow design and optimization, data provenance, knowledge representation, and data integration. He is  involved in several collaborative R&D projects, including the DOE Scientific Data Management Center project (SciDAC/SDM) and NSF projects to develop workflow technology (Kepler-CORE) and cyberinfrastructure for bioinformatics and environmental observatory applications.  Prof. Ludaescher received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Until 2004 he was a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD.  He can be contacted at ludaesch@ucdavis.edu.

http://www.polararet.no/conference/esc/article/2009/1257950088.29

 The International Polar Year (IPY), from March 2007 to March 2009, was a large scientific program focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic.IPY involved thousands of scientists from more than 60 nations in a wide range of physical, biological and social research. The IPY Oslo Science Conference (IPY-OSC 2010) will be the first major meeting of scientists to share results from IPY research. Education, outreach and communication (EOC) has been a central part of IPY and we would like to give teachers and other educators the opportunity to share their experiences. If you have not been involved in IPY, but want to use polar issues in your classroom, you are also welcome to participate.

If you are selected as a participant at the teacher conference you automatically become a participant at the science conference during the rest of the week. You are expected to attend both the teacher and science conferences. You need to arrive on June 5 and depart June 11 at the earliest.

When and Where:

The introductory part of the teacher conference will take place at The University of Oslo June 6 and June 7 2010. The science conference lasts from June 8 until June 12.

Teachers will attend the science conference and meet regularly during the week to share their experiences and ideas.

Who Can Participate:

It’s wide open to teachers and educators worldwide including pre-service teachers.

How to Apply:

To participate in the PolarTEACHERS conference you need to register and apply. There are two ways to be selected:

1. Present a paper to one of the Theme 6 parallel session <http://www.ipy-osc.no/article/2009/1245943735.35>  in the IPY-OSC  2010 by submitting an abstract on a project or activity that you were involved in during IPY.

2. Write an application describing how you plan to use polar science in your classroom.

Check out the website to learn more!

http://www.polararet.no/conference/esc/article/2009/1257950088.29

Or, contact Louise Huffman

lhuffman@andrill.org

ANDRILL Coordinator of Education and Public Outreach

630-460-3688

Recently, I have spent many hours working with seven students as they develop their own demonstrations and hands-on activities focusing on elements—the theme of this year’s National Chemistry Week (NCW)—“Chemistry—It’s Elemental!” What a special privilege this has been for me. My love of chemistry and my desire to share that love with others is coming to life in these students. Giving students the opportunity to “do chemistry” is one of my primary goals, and these students are doing that as they teach others how to do chemistry safely. The students have taken ideas from past laboratory experiments—the lighting of a piece of Mg ribbon, or video clips from Periodic Table Live! (the addition of sodium to water, see image below)—or searches through the literature, especially the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) and the Internet, and adapted them to fit their presentation style.

(http://www.chemeddl.org/collections/ptl/PTL/elements/Na/frames.html)

This came about when a faculty member at my school asked if I would be interested in reaching out to a small, private school in downtown Indianapolis, IN. I answered with a resounding Yes! The school’s eighth-grade science teacher was thrilled to have us come to her two science classes of 21 students each. When I asked our junior and senior classes for volunteers, seven students—3 boys and 4 girls—immediately came forward and were really excited to share their passion for chemistry with the younger students, especially during NCW. This kind of student enthusiasm makes me feel very special as a teacher.

As I write this editorial, the students are still developing some of the demonstrations. The school visit will occur in two weeks, during NCW. They have already selected demos and hands-on activities that focus on elements in groups 1, 2, 16, 17, and 18. The students have taken charge of their own organization and planning; my role has been to make sure everything is safe and the materials the students need are available.

In the December 2009 issue of the Journal, the article by McCarthy and Widanski especially spoke to me about the importance of my role as a high school chemistry teacher. The authors report on “chemistry anxiety” and address several issues from their research. Their data on different types of chemistry anxiety indicate that handling chemicals ranked second of chemistry anxieties, more anxiety-provoking even than learning chemistry. By allowing my students to share their passion for chemistry with younger students, I hope the younger students will see the passion and “fun” of exploring chemistry and not have as many fears as they grow up. This also gives the older students the opportunity to handle chemicals in a new situation and to plan, test, and perform a demonstration. I hope this lowers the older students’ anxiety.

This type of exchange that we have with our students and then share with each other in the Journal is what teaching is all about, from my perspective. So, as 2009 draws to a close, remember that Erica and I are here to help each of you share ideas from your classroom, a laboratory, an activity, and so forth with your fellow colleagues. Just ask.

Erica’s Take on the Issue
from Erica K. Jacobsen, JCE High School Editor

I was glad Laura highlighted McCarthy and Widanski’s article. High school educators browsing through the table of contents of the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education might think the triangle () next to “Assessment of Chemistry Anxiety in a Two-Year College” is a typo. Don’t let the title fool you. The article discusses the existence of anxiety toward chemistry in three areas: learning chemistry, chemistry evaluation, and handling chemicals. The authors state, “Recognizing the existence [of chemistry anxiety] is the first step in reducing negative attitudes toward chemistry”—an issue of which educators on any level should be aware.

American Chemical Society 2010 Spring Meeting

If you are attending the ACS’s spring national meeting in San Francisco, don’t miss the High School Day program. The meeting’s overall theme is “Chemistry for a Sustainable World”; the High School Day organizers are coordinating their program with this theme. Early materials state that presentations will “make the case for green chemistry” and will include hands-on activities, information about available resources, and discussion of how to smoothly implement green chemistry in your own curriculum. JCE will present “Go Green for Earth Day with the Journal of Chemical Education”, which will include JCE resources for the green chemistry theme and Earth Day 2010, and a soon-to-be-published JCE Classroom Activity.

JCE High School Chemed Learning Information Center (CLIC)

On Thursday, January 28, 2010, we’re hosting a Fedora/DuraSpace technically-focused “meet-up,” led by DuraSpace’s Thorny Staples, for library and campus IT staff, faculty, and stakeholders, as well as regional Fedora community members. Topics include an exploration of repository architecture and functionality, interface strategies, cloud opportunities, and any direction the participant-driven discussion takes us!  We’ll end the afternoon with opportunities to share what’s working and what’s challenging data curation-wise at your institutions!

More information about the conference, keynotes, and registration* can be found on the Alliance web site at http://www.coalliance.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=291&Itemid=103, or contact the Alliance at 303.759.3399, or adr@coalliance.org.

This event is sponsored by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries with the generous support of BCR.

*Each Alliance Member Institution is welcome to send up to 8 attendees, at the Dean’s/Director’s discretion. As an alternative to designated individuals completing the online registration form, libraries may opt to send member attendees lists to geri@coalliance.org by January 8, 2010. Additional Member attendees may be subject to the general registration fee of $30/day.

We want to hear about new projects, large and small, and new technologies that will have an impact on higher education in the years to come.

Join us in San Diego this March:
Ten Years of Open Source Innovation
March 8 - 10, 2009
The Town and Country Resort, San Diego, California

Supplementary Seminars on March 7th and the afternoon of March 10th
Developer Workshops, March 11 - 12

Call for Proposals

Deadline for submission of proposals for half or full day seminars has passed and will not be extended. Deadline for submission of proposals for all other sessions: extended to November 25, 2009

Conference site: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html

Dear Colleague:

Help us celebrate Jasig’s 10th anniversary in San Diego with outstanding speakers and special events.

The focus is on innovation this year. We’ll be highlighting new and established work from higher education institutions:  Projects you should know about; local projects in search of community; creative work by established communities of practice; projects that exist only as a gleam in the eye of a creative developer.

Come and see presentations and seminars on new technologies soon to impact higher education.  We’re seeking talks on topics such as Scala, Spring 3, deployment to the Cloud, Groovy, Grails, REST, Jersey, mobile applications, etc.

We invite you to propose talks, seminars, birds-of-a-feather sessions, demos, and poster session displays on new and current campus applications: Enterprise portlets, CAS, uPortal, Bedework Calendar, Identity & Access Management, Fluid, ESUP Helpdesk, OpenRegistry, Sakai, Kuali, Internet2 Middleware Solutions, Fedora and DSpace, and others.

Talks will be presented in one of four tracks:

Designing & Developing

For developers, architects, UX designers, testers. Presentations for people who build applications.

Deploying & Integrating

For people who need to make applications work on campus: developers, content providers, team leaders, evangelists. In particular, we would like to highlight work that integrates open source projects within the enterprise infrastructure and with each other.

Managing & Governing

What are best practices for managing community source projects or their deployments on campus? For encouraging adoption? For gaining acceptance and campus buy-in? For engaging your community in the processes? Presentations for managers, team leaders, executives, planners and strategists.

Looking Ahead

What are the technologies that will impact higher education in the coming years? What project work, prototypes, plans, and local campus applications would you like to share with a community of your peers?

Half-day Supplementary Seminars will be held in the morning and afternoon on Sunday, March 7th as well as on Wednesday (March 10th) afternoon.

Proposals may be entered on the Jasig Conference Website. Proposalsrequire a Title, an Abstract (under 500 words), a Presenter Profile, and some basic affiliation information.  This year we are also asking proposal submitters to select tags that best describe their proposals.

Submit your proposal directly at http://www.ja-sig.org/jasigconf/call-form.jsp?conf_id=jasig17 or from the conference home page, where you can find all the details: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html (Click the Call for Proposals link on the left).

We look forward to seeing you at Ten Years of Open Source Innovation!

The Jasig 2010 Spring Conference Planning Committee

This survey will help the CIRES Education and Outreach Group at the University of Colorado at Boulder design a set of NASA-funded professional development experiences for teachers about climate and climate change. GLOBE and the National Science Digital Library are partners in this project.

They need 200 middle and high school STEM teachers to participate by December 15, 2009. Log on now as the gift certificates will go fast!

It will take you about 10 minutes to complete the survey.

If you are interested, please email Susan Lynds for the survey link at susan.lynds@colorado.edu.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to help us design our professional development to meet your needs! For more information about the project, see http://cires.colorado.edu/education/k12/ICEE/index.html.