If you build a web site, they will come — as long as they know how to find you. Google and other search engines learn what is on the Internet by sending an army of “bots” to crawl through the web and send back reports on what they have found. The bots are programmed […]

Our blog NSDL Road Reports was busy over Presidents’ Day Weekend. Correspondent Carol Minton Morris sent out a stream of dispatches from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, including reports on the Plenary address from AAAS President Dr. David Baltimore, a speech by the President […]

The presenters in the NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar Series are a lucky bunch. They get paid to do what they love. In the blog Careers in Science, these scientists share their stories about what turned them on to scientific inquiry, what their training was like, and how they found the job of their dreams. The […]

The heavyweight champion among Expert Voices blogs has returned for another semester. “Networks” is a course in economics, sociology, and information science at Cornell taught by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. Its subject is how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these […]

A pioneer in the online delivery of educational resources has found a new home. Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will maintain the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). DLESE is the leading resource for online geoscience education. It predates NSDL by […]

Three court decisions and a new law made 2007 a very good year for teachers who want the freedom to use whatever they want in their classrooms. In a paper released last month, Jonathan Band explains recent legal decisions that permit extensive copying and display of copyrighted material on commercial sites because the uses involve […]

What is NSDL’s purpose? Here’s the official answer: “providing organized access to high-quality resources, materials, products, and services that support teaching, learning, and research at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).” Which digital resources are appropriate for NSDL’s collection, and which are not? Who owns these materials, who […]

A “good word attack” is what happens when a spam e-mail firm idenfies words considered “strongly legitimate” by spam filters, and uses strings of these words to attack e-mail in-boxes.  A paper describing the practice is noted in issue #126 of Whiteboard Report.  We went to our logs and found these recent good word attacks […]

Highlights of the 2007 NSDL Annual Meeting are captured in the blog Road Reports, including posts on Webmetrics, the use of digital learning resources by college faculty, what’s going on in the picture on the left, Lee Zia’s annual contribution of haiku, and this quote from Susan Jesuroga: “this meeting underscores that the important […]

A special issue of Whiteboard Report is loaded with information about the 2007 NSDL Annual Meeting, which will be held Tuesday-Thursday, November 6-8 in Arlington, Virginia. Here’s what we are expecting to see:
205 Registered Attendees
73 First-time Attendees
36 NSF program officers registered
117 Projects Represented
59 Registered Posters
34 Sessions
20 Hours of scheduled meeting time
49 Hours of potential meeting […]