What will it take for the whole of NSDL to add up to more than the sum of its parts in creating innovative access to cyberlearning opportunities for the nation’s students and teachers? It’s an interesting question that two parts of NSDL went to Washington to try and answer for representatives of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which provides funding for NSDL’s Technical Network Services (TNS), Resource Center (RC), Pathways and more than 200 digital library projects since 2000. Carl Lagoze, PI TNS, Kaye Howe, PI RC and Tamara Sumner, Co-PI TNS, shared progress, ideas, strategies and updates with NSF program officers and others on April 17, 2009.

Warm spring weather set the stage for lively NSDL presentations that were focused on lessons learned about the evolution of NSDL from its early days as a static library “meme” (an understandable unit of interrelated cultural and scholarly ideas and practices)-driven model to what it is in 2009—a network of distributed people, projects, standards, content and technologies that combine to create an educational contextual layer over and across STEM disciplines and resources.

Dr. Hal Richtol, NSF NSDL Program Director, began the presentation with a historical reference to the early days of the NSDL program by explaining its 1996-1997 roots in NSF-funded planning studies (see NSDL Reflections Weblog, “Implementations and Innovation in the NSDL” by William Arms). Dr. Linda Slakey, NSF Division of Undergraduate Education Division Director followed by explaining that the term “cyberlearning” was originally used by an EHR working group to focus thinking around the idea of a “platform perspective” in support of online leaning opportunities. She noted that NSDL has been asked to provide cyberlearning infrastructure in a very broad context.

Dr. Wanda Ward, NSF Education and Human Resources Acting Assistant Director, sees NSDL at a key intersection of NSF’s evolving view of cyberlearning and the importance of placing STEM content in context. To emphasize this evolution she noted that NSF changed the meaning behind the acronymn used to brand “NSDL” from “National Science Digital Library” to “National STEM Education Distributed Learning.”

NSDL TNS PI  Carl Lagoze at NSF.

Carl Lagoze, PI, Technical Network Services, Cornell University, placed NSDL in yet another context–that of digital libraries and the Web over the last fifteen years. He noted that Dr. Ward’s explanation of why the meaning behind the NSDL acronym had evolved was a good introduction to his overview of a changed and disrupted digital library “meme.” In 1992 Esther Dyson asked, “What is the digital library? That term smacks of “filmed play,” “horseless carriage,” and the like. The digital library will be less like a library than we think, and more like itself.” The real question for NSDL and other digital library projects what what were the characteristics that would make the digital library “more like itself?”

Lagoze noted that early digital libraries were generally in synch with the idea that core library services were related to core concepts through an intermediated service layer that closely resembled physical library services. Lagoze explained this idea by saying, “Chaos was tamed by the discipline of a union catalog.”

“In the 90s the web was like watching TV,” he went on. “It was a static document information space with walled gardens, silos and artifacts from the traditional Library meme brought into an electronic version of the Library.” This meme was then disrupted by ubiquitous Web technologies like Google. He believes that we now share a vision of a Web that will integrate highly valued information spaces like NSDL into the fabric of the semantic web.

NSDL RC PI  Kaye Howe highlights Resource Center activities at NSF.

Dr. Kaye Howe, PI, Resource Center, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), followed Lagoze with a look at Project Tomorrow findings from surveys they have conducted of over 1.5 million students from 14 thousand schools since 2003. She emphasized that Project Tomorrow is working with NSDL’s Resource Center and discovering that there is a danger of students “tuning out” when they get to schools where the Web is either blocked or not easily accessible. She warned that schools could become irrelevant unless teachers, communities and educational organizations like NSDL can find ways to keep students actively engaged in mediated online learning.

Howe went on to explain the costly and challenging “quest” with regard to evaluating the educational significance of NSDL and other resources as part of a network of national STEM education distributed learning. Howe referred to Book III of Jonathan’s Swifts Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage To Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubbdrib,and Japan, in which the scholarly inhabitants of the flying island of Laputa were such deep thinkers that each required,

“ A soft Flap on his Eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in Cogitation, that he is in manifest Danger of falling down every Precipice, and bouncing his Head against every Post; and in the Streets, of jostling others, or being jostled himself into the Kennel.”

Howe’s point was that the processes and deliberations with which educational evaluation writ large is approached do not always lead to meaningful understandings of how students’ ability to learn is improved through cyber-enabled methods. She detailed aspects of NSDL’s leadership in facilitating ongoing discussion and distributed problem solving in determining the value of online STEM educational resources and opportunities as part of the way forward in finding out more about what works for teachers and students online.

Tamara Sumner, Co-PI NSDL TNS, discusses NSDL Technical Network Services improvements.

Dr. Tamara Sumner, Co-PI PI, Technical Network Services, University of Colorado, reviewed the Technical Network Services role that NSF envisioned in the solicitation and highlighted recent accomplishments towards delivering those services in the first six months of TNS operation .She highlighted early examples of how TNS is creating and maintaining a cyberlearning platform (http://ncore.nsdl.org) while strategically moving forward to engage a community of educational technology developers.

“TNS is streamlining operations,” She said. An extensive audit of NSDL’s technical services and infrastructure in Fall 2008 provided many examples of just where that streamlining could occur. As an example she pointed out, “Single sign-on was developed for NSDL by Columbia University with Shibboleth technology to safely shuffle users between walled gardens of content. This approach is no longer needed because NSDL partners have largely embraced open access concepts.” As a result more lightweight authorization processes will be implemented to serve NSDL’s reduced needs and eliminate costly infrastructure. She also outlined plans to selectively prune collections from the
large 2 million+ digital object NSDL Data Repository to dramatically improve the educational utility of the collection.

This flier was distributed to fill attendees in on NSDL TNS strategic plans going forward.

Echoing Dr. Slakey’s remarks on taking a plaform perspective to enable innovation in cyberlearning Sumner reported on the release of NSDL EduPak on Mar. 31. NSDL EduPak 1.0 (#0840744 ) is a publicly available, lightweight version of NCore (http://ncore.nsdl.org), established in 2008 as an open-source digital library platform of technology and standards that create a dynamic information layer on top of library resources. Built using NCore components, EduPak is an all-in-one, open source, education digital repository solution bundle that provides a general platform for building digital libraries. Using NSDL EduPak national educational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, educational researchers, and discipline-oriented pedagogical product providers can use this basic technology—a repository API, a collection management system and a search service–to build educational digital repositories in support of cyberlearning goals (download it here: http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/Community:EduPak).

Sumner concluded by saying, “NSDL is a learning community that is increasingly large and diverse.” To adequately serve this shifting community in an age when the next-best-new thing is always being served up on the Web visionaries like Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn (Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns), who articulate how teaching and learning might operate in an age of of disruptive technology need to be listened to in formulating plans for NSDL’s future.

The hour-long discussion that followed among NSF program officers, NSDL Pathways representatives, NSDL PIs and researchers made it clear that enthusiasm for NSDL as an evolving and highly-valued part of national STEM educational infrastructure for teaching and learning was high.

The NSDL EduPak magnet goes well on any refridgerator.