A team of NSDL Community members has begun an ambitious effort to help elementary teachers become more knowledgeable about the polar regions. The project “Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears,” part of the International Polar Year program, aims to provide best practices on how to integrate polar concepts into teaching. The group will begin publishing an electronic magazine next spring, but their blog is already up and running on Expert Voices. Kim Lightle of Middle School Portal, PI of the project, would like to hear your ideas, suggestions, and observations. What would you like to know more about? What questions have your students asked about the polar regions? Do you have a favorite activity that you would like to share? Visit the blog to share your ideas, suggestions, or observations, and check back each week for a new post. You can also download the RSS feed for the blog, or request email notification whenever new content is posted.

When the 2007 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing convened on Monday morning, the difference was apparent. Most of the 400 people in the room were younger than 30, and pale-skinned guys were in the minority. There was a roughly equal mix of black and Latino students, and there were more women than men. They were stylish and fun, too. They were itching to go to Disneyworld, which was just across the street. “We’re not people with big glasses and pocket protectors who talk in a monotone,” said Christopher Harris, a grad student at UC Irvine.

This was a crowd with a mission: breaking in. The plenary speaker set the tone. “Fundamental ideas about the role of computing in society are going to change, and your contributions are going to be critical,” said Shirley Malcolm, head of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The technical stuff isn’t the most important part of computing, she said. She encouraged the crowd to think of the machines as tools that can be used to create a better world. Several reports from the conference are posted in Road Reports.

Shodor, a Durham, North Carolina-based nonprofit organization serving educators and students and the NSDL Computational Science Pathway partner, has been recognized by Cisco for its innovative use of technology to improve math and science education nationally. Shodor was named a grand prize winner in the Nonprofit category of the Cisco Growing with Technology Awards 2007. Winners were announced Oct. 9 during a ceremony at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood Shores, California.

Accepting the award were Dr. Robert Panoff, president and executive director of Shodor, and Shodor’s first intern, Monte Evans, who is now pursuing his master’s degree in information science at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. For the complete report, visit NSDL Pathways News.

Monte Evans at work

Two NSDL blogs have commemorated the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Space Age. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched its “prosteishy sputnik,” or “simplest satellite.” Sputnik-1 stayed in Earth’s orbit for 22 days, sending back a signal to announce that the space age had begun. The Expert Voices blog NSDL Highlights recently reviewed library resources that relate to Sputnik, while the Pathways News blog posted a guide to Sputnik and Aerospace resources in the Engineering Pathway. Be sure to also check out the homepage of NASA, which posted its Sputnik offering on October 4.

Bethany Carlson says she “was one of those kids in high school whose social life revolved around science and design competitions.” After college, she began exploring why science classes didn’t seem to attract more women or minorities. Now she is doing something about it - and on September 20, she shared her findings in the first web seminar of a series jointly sponsored by NSDL and the National Science Teachers Association.

Carlson worked in a middle school for a couple of years, then joined the Education Development Center to write curricula. Now she is helping build The Fun Works , an NSDL collection that connects kids to a wide variety of science, technology, engineering, and math careers. Unlike sites for high schoolers which try to help students choose a single major, the FunWorks tries to broaden kids’ interests.

The FunWorks surveyed hundreds of students during the initial stages of collection development, says Carlson. They noticed that young people often name career aspirations based on a very small number of high-visibility careers, such as doctor, nurse, lawyer, basketball player, singer/rapper, teacher, day care worker, and cosmetologist. Their ideas about the connections between school and future work are vague. Students who say they want to become doctors, for example, might say that they need to study biology now and go to college later, but they often don’t know that math and chemistry are important, too, or how grades in all subjects factor into a competitive admissions processes. And young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely than their more affluent peers to know the details of a career pathway.

A design team of African American and Latino young people from a Boston community center helped design FunWorks. They grouped STEM careers into six main categories: Music, Technology, Medicine/Law, Art & Design, Sports, and Exploration. Many careers are cross-listed, so by clicking on a single category, a young person gets a list of careers which they might not have considered individually. You can comment on Carlson’s work by visiting her post on the new blog Careers in Science. New posts will accompany each monthly NSDL/NSTA web seminar through the year. Click here for more information on the series. Free pre-registration for the seminars is required.

The NSDL Middle School Portal has started a new blog called “Connecting News With National Science Education Standards” to encourage teachers to use current events as teaching opportunities. Every Thursday, MSP staff will link a current news article to related teaching resources that connect specific content standards to that event.  The first post, which went up as the new school year began, took off from an ABC News story on how genetics determines height.

Kim Lightle, PI of the Middle School Portal, says that articles in the new blog may be appropriate for students to read directly, or they may serve as background knowledge for teachers and inspiration for subsequent instructional activities. The related middle level, grades 5-8 content standards of the National Science Contact Standards will be included along with links to additional information such as lessons, reference articles, and definitions. Teachers are encouraged to save the links if the weekly blog topic is not immediately relevant to their current lesson topics.  Check it out here.

Expert Voices recently noted a new NSDL resource that just might be the last word in the argument over whether or not people are heating up the planet. It is a presentation by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at the University of California-San Diego, to the American Meteorological Society’s Environmental Science Seminar Series. Oreskes reviews decades of climate research to support a masterful description of how scientists prove things. The presentation ends this way: “We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change. There is no reason to think otherwise.”

Oreskes’ presentation happened on June 22, 2007, so it reflects a consensus among scientists that was reached some time ago. But when you enter the term “‘global warming’ debate” in NSDL’s search box, you get 297 resources, some of which are more than ten years old and have not been updated recently. These older resources are useful artifacts of a time when there really was a debate over human-induced global warming, but they are not current information. You have to dig around to find that. A wiki project called “OurNSDL” is now in development that will allow users to share information on the best NSDL resources having to do with subjects such as climate change.

One recent OurNSDL test searched the collection using the term “‘global warming’ debate” to see what came up. The first resource listed was Dr. James E. Hansen’s January 1999 article The Global Warming Debate, which is posted on the website of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. The article was published back when there really was a debate — but since it was written, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released two assessment reports that effectively ended the argument. If you know that James Hansen is a climate scientist with a long history of making high-profile warming warnings, you might do another NSDL search using his name. When you do, you get an abstract of Hansen’s March 2004 article in Scientific American magazine called Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb. Also listed is a more recent resource from NASA, Hansen’s former employer. It is a fact sheet on global warming from their Earth Observatory project. Hansen is now on the faculty of Columbia University, and the most current information listing his publications is on his web page.

NSDL users are surfing around like this every day to find the freshest resources and add them to their lesson plans. The goal of OurNSDL is to let users share what they have found.

Mercury transits the sun, November 8, 2006

Bill Wilson of the Memphis Astronomical Society took this photo of the planet Mercury passing across the face of the sun by holding the lens of his digital camera up to the viewfinder of a telescope. Enthusiasm for star-gazing is infectious at the Memphis Society’s site, which was recently added to NSDL’s resource collection and profiled in the blog “New In NSDL.” Other recent arrivals profiled on the blog include:

* Classic Chemistry, a definitive site on the history of chemistry by LeMoyne College professor Carmen Giunta that includes classic papers and calculations, a glossary of archaic chemical terms, and a calendar of chemistry history;

*Conservation Central, a project of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park designed for middle school biology classes. The site explores the Asian temperate forest, home of the giant panda and black bear, through a variety of games and activities;

*Pacific Biodiversity Information Forum, a new project that aims to develop a complete, scientifically sound, and electronically accessible biological knowledge base on the countries in and around the Pacific Ocean. It is part of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the The Global Taxonomy Initiative , which coordinate similar efforts for other bio-regions; and,

*The Science House - Countertop Chemistry, part of a venerable outreach program from the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at North Carolina State University. The site includes recipes children and teachers can use to do chemistry experiments without fancy equipment.

Recent additions to the NSDL Collection are listed in the “New Collections in NSDL” page. The blog “New in NSDL” describes them in more detail.

What is the Internet? Jen Wofford talked it over with an American-born fourth grader. Then she gave him a stack of magazines, scissors, and glue, and he made this picture:

Next, Wofford did the same thing with a child the same age who had recently come to the U.S. from Burma. Here’s what he came up with:

“I was surprised by how many of them put money in their pictures,” said Wofford. “It could mean that computers seem very expensive to them, or it could be that they see the Internet as a place where they can earn money.” The first boy also put numbers in his picture. “He wanted to fill up the whole page with numbers,” says Wofford. “The emphasis on games was also strong for all the children. To them, the Internet is not about communication yet. It’s about getting games and playing with Google.”

Wofford, an assistant dean in the Computing and Information Science Department at Cornell University, introduced ten third and fourth-graders to the Internet in the community room of their apartment complex in Ithaca, NY. These images are from the Expert Voices blog Real Place, Virtual Space, which combines her log of this after-school class with intriguing posts from the students themselves.

“People say that literacy education is not value-neutral. The class showed me that this is also true for training in technological literacy,” she says. In one class, students built and furnished their own virtual structures using Activeworlds, which is software hosted and programmed by Cornell’s Theory Center. A Vietnamese girl who was learning English later commented that she liked how the game allowed to play and learn at the same time: “When you click on the picture of the TV, you will see the little field. You can see the word TV2. Then you just ignore the number you can know how to say that word in English.”

“I never would have thought of that,” said Wofford. “It shows me that we need to be careful not to frame the problems for them using our assumptions of what the Internet is for. We need to let children explore in an open way so they can figure things out for themselves.”

“It amuses me when people wring their hands about a crisis in getting school children interested in science,”says Barry Fisher. “Forensics does that. It is a positive side effect.”

Ambassador for Science? 

Fisher is director of the crime laboratory for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and a national spokesman for forensic scientists. He makes his comment in a new Expert Voices blog called Science on TV. The blog is about a recent explosion of entertainment programs with scientists in starring roles, the effect these programs are having on students, and the ambivalent feelings that real scientists sometimes have about being portrayed by sexy actors. Fisher puts his finger on it when he points out that the public’s fascination with forensic science began with O. J. Simpson. Few people want to be associated with O.J., but millions of ordinary Americans learned about DNA sampling and other scientific techniques by watching his trial on TV 12 years ago.

Naren Shankar, who acquired a Ph.D in applied physics before becoming a writer and producer for the CBS mega-hit “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” says in the blog that the appeal of his show comes from its emphasis on the power of empirical analysis. “People love to know how things work, and they like to be taken into those roles,” he says. “That’s why we push the camera into carpet fibers and through cadavers. Going into things is part of the appeal.”

Some digital education providers have already jumped on the bandwagon. An archived Expert Voices blog called Boneyard Science: Investigating Forensics has lots of interesting links, and a new site called Eforensics is being developed by the Eskeletons team at the University of Texas. The forensics theme was everywhere at the National Science Teachers Association meeting this year, and the teachers we spoke with said they were packaging chemistry and physics lessons as crime investigations because their students had gotten all jazzed up by “CSI.” So what’s the problem?

“A few years ago, when I was president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, I pleaded with the National Science Foundation to focus more on the field,” says Fisher. “I got nowhere. Some high-up NSF guy said to me, ‘forensic science is not real science. We’re only involved in real science.’ And even now, the number of forensics research projects at NSF is close to zero.” It’s an old problem: pure research looks down on applied research and is reluctant to associate with it. But if Americans have a desperate need to make a new generation of scientists and forensics is sparking their interest, shouldn’t pure science types just get over it? Please log in and leave us your comments.