Developing Middle School Students’ Conceptual Understanding and Scientific Habits of Mind
NSDL’s Middle School Portal and the National Middle School Association hosted a web seminar entitled, “A New Model of Science Curricula and Instruction” on Thursday, May 29, 2008.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_02
Related Link: http://msteacher.org/

Plug the NSDL Wiki into the NSDL Repository and Get . . . A Scholarly Publication
A new National Science Digital Library (NSDL) scholarly publication, Classic Articles in Context (CAC), was launched in April 2008 with an atmospheric science theme: “Climate Change and Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming: A Selection of Key Articles, 1824-1995, with Interpretive Essays.” Classic Articles in Context will present additional significant scientific questions of the Twentieth Century using landmark and important legacy papers in future issues.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_03
Related Link: http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/PALE:ClassicArticles

Francis Eberle Named Executive Director of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA)
Francis Eberle, executive director of the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance (MMSA) and an NSDL PI, will take the lead at NSTA in August replacing Gerry Wheeler as NSTA’s executive director.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_04
Related Link: http://www.nsta.org/about/pressroom.aspx?id=54908

NSDL at Minnesota Independent Schools “Affinity Day”
Teachers from Minnesota schools recently came to Providence Academy in Minneapolis to hear Bob Panoff, Founder and Executive Director of the Shodor Foundation, share his ideas about “Resources and Collaborations Available for Teachers through the National Science Digital Library.”
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_05
Related Link: http://www.shodor.org/cyberpathways/

Engineering Education History in Expert Voices
Engineering Pathway PI Alice Agogino regularly posts a “Today in History” item of interest in NSDL’s blogosphere.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_06
Related Link: http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/pathwaysnews/author/aliceagogino/

See All the Way Around a Molecule
A description of the ChemEd DL’s new collection of molecular models called Molecules 360.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_08
Related Link: http://www.chemeddl.org/collections/molecules/index.php

NSDL Core Integration Staff Updates
Karen Henry, former NSDL Core Integration Technical Project Manager, and and Alex Chaux, former NSDL Core Integration Programmer have accepted positions with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_07

E V E N T S

NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar: Enlightening Experiences with Energy
Get ready for labs, interactives, historical accounts, and lesson plans related to energy curricula on June 12, 2008, 6:30-8:00 p.m. ET–all at your fingertips! Brought to you by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_19
Related Link: http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/SeminarRegistration.aspx

Summertime Fedora Commons User Meetings and Events
Fedora open source repository platform users are planning meetings and events in Canada and Europe throughout the summer and early fall. Take a look at upcoming opportunities to share ideas and information.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_11
Related Link: http://www.ecdl2008.org/

Moving To the “Next Level” of Materials Science Education
Laura Bartolo, PI of NSDL MatDL Pathway, is co-organizer of an upcoming NSF supported Materials Science Education Workshop to be held August 3-5, 2008 in Washington, D.C. The workshop is sponsored by the NSF Directorate of Math & Physical Sciences, Division of Materials Research. The goal of the workshop is to bring together 40 invited representatives from the materials science education community for a two-day workshop to provide a roadmap to the “next level” of materials science education for the coming decade.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_111
Related Link: http://matdl.org/

Thank you for Your Annual Meeting 2008 Submission
The Annual Meeting Planning Committee and reviewers are reading proposals for presentations and Lightning Talks for the 2008 NSDL Annual Meeting to be held September 30–October 5 in Washington, D.C.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_112
Related Link: http://onramp.nsdl.org/eserv/onramp:534/AM07_final_report.pdf

Climate Discovery Online Courses for Educators: Summer Session Now Accepting Registrations
This summer The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) offers a series of seven-week online courses for middle and high school teachers that combine geoscience content, information about current climate research, easy to implement hands-on activities, and group discussion.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_114
Related Link: http://ecourses.ncar.ucar.edu

SPARC Institutional Repositories Conference
SPARC, in partnership with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan/National Institute of Informatics, announces the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, to be held November 17-18, 2008 at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_113
Related Link: http://www.arl.org/sparc/ir08/

Web Seminar Series to Feature “Math Tools in Action”
Find out how to add dynamic computations and visualizations to websites using webMathematica 2. The Wolfram Education Group announces its newest seminar series scheduled throughout June 2008, “S22: Overview of webMathematica.”
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_114
Related Link: http://www.wolfram.com/services/education/seminar.cgi

B O O K M A R K S

Highlights From the June 2008 Issue of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears
Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears issue 4 focuses on “Weather and Climate: From Home to the Poles.”
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_216
Related Link: http://beyond penguins.nsdl.org

‘Open Students” Seeks Guest Bloggers
‘Open Students’ accepts guests posts on any aspect of Open Access and welcome guest posts by students, faculty, librarians, administrators, publishers, and others.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_217
Related Link: http://www.openstudents.org/write/

Future Libraries
The editorial in the May/June Issue of D-Lib Magazine introduces a new JISC web site, Libraries of the Future,” that addresses the provocative question, “In an information world in which Google apparently offers us everything, what place is there for the traditional, and even the digital, library? In a library environment which is increasingly moving to the delivery of online rather than print resources, what of the academic library’s traditional place at the heart of campus life?”
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_218
Related Link: http://dlib.org/dlib/may08/05editorial.html

Curriki–The Global Education & Learning Community’s “Summer of Content”
Curriki is offering $500 per unit of instruction and $1600 per semester course to ensure strong curriculum coverage for all major subject areas in K-12.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_219
Related Link: http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/SummerofContent

I N S P I R A T I O N

The Story of Stuff
This site has presented over 2 million viewers with a multi-media description of all the “stuff” in our lives created by the industrial-consumer process—from its raw material extraction, manufacture, sale, use and disposal, along with how the “cycle of stuff” affects communities at home and abroad even though most of this cycle is hidden.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php?issue=current#id_320
Related Link: http://storyofstuff.org/

From the Exploratorium: Digital Library Afterschool Website Launches!
Through a collaboration with the California School-age Consortium and their trainee network, Exploratorium outreach specialists are sharing NSDL materials and resources from the website with afterschool leaders and frontline staff across California.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_01
Related Link: http://www.exploratorium.edu/afterschool/activities/

From BioSciEd Net (BEN): Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education focuses on Genomes and Online Learning Outcomes
A new volume of the Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education (JMBE) has been published in the American Society for Microbiology’s (ASM) MicrobeLibrary.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_02
Related Link: http://www.microbelibrary.org

Streamlined and Eye-catching New Look for Chem Ed Digital Library
The Chemical Education Digital Library has a new look. All of the original content is there plus new content has been added, and appearance and functionality have been improved.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_04
Related Link: http://chemeddl.org/

Shodor Director Bob Panoff Delivers Keynote in Rome
A keynote address was given on Mar. 18, 2008 by Dr. Robert M. Panoff, founder and director of the Shodor Education Foundation in Durham, NC, as part of the UNIV 2008 Forum in Rome.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_05
Related Link: http://www.shodor.org

Connecting People, Places, Ideas and Passion in NSDL’s Blogosphere
The final lecture to Networks 204 that has generated over 600 blog posts in Expert Voices capped the three-year teaching and research initiative with a lecture entitled, “Getting Connected: Social Science in the Age of Networks.”
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_06
Related Link: http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/cornell-info204/

Try an Interactive Fossil Sort from Content Clips
The interactive fossil sort, used as part of an assessment probe activity and the electronic storybooks in the April 2008 issue of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears magazine, illustrate how teachers can use Content Clips to create their own classroom interactives. Note that Content Clips requires Adobe Flash.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_07
Related Link: http://tinyurl.com/69mkxn

Guidelines for Managing Copyright for NIH Public Access Requirements
In a preprint article published online by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Duke University Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin L. Smith offers pragmatic strategies that authors and their institutions can use to manage authors’ copyrights to fulfill the requirements of the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_08
Related Link: http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br258.shtml

E V E N T S

Get Online for a Free Polar Geography Lesson from Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears Magazine
Join experts from Ohio State University: Jessica Fries-Gaither, Elementary Resource Specialist and Beyond Penguins Project Director, and Carol Landis, Education Outreach Specialist at the Byrd Polar Research Center as they examine the unique and dramatically different areas of Arctic and Antarctic regions through the lens of geography.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_19
Related Link: http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/SeminarRegistration.aspx

Mark Your Calendars for the 2008 NSDL Annual Meeting
The 2008 NSDL Annual Meeting will be held from September 30 to October 2, 2008 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. The theme for this year’s meeting is “STEM Research and Education in Action.”
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_110
Related Link: http://annualmeeting.nsdl.org

Tune in to CONFCHEM, a Virtual Chemistry Conference
From April 22 until May 18, 2008 “CONFCHEM”, a virtual conference, is taking place using email and a listserv. The CONFCHEM schedule consists of a series of eight paper presentations focused on “Chemistry at the National Science Digital Library.”
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_111
Related Link: http://www.ched-ccce.org/confchem/2008/b/index.htm

SAVE on Early Registration for the Fedora Red Island Repository Institute
Register by May 16 and reserve your spot at the Fedora-focused Repository Institute on Prince Edward Island, one of Canada’s premiere travel destinations known for its sandy beaches, golfing, seafood and iconic red dirt roads.
Click here to view full article: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue.php#id_112
Related Link: http://vre.upei.ca/riri

NMC Virtual Campus Turns Two
The New Media Consortium’s virtual campus on SecondLife.com turns two years old this month. Boot up your avatar  and drop by to attend events  at an online amphitheatre or share ideas in a virtual teacher’s lounge.  On March 24 at 11 am Pacific time, the NMC is invited to hear Byron Reeves, a professor at Stanford, co-founder of Media X, and research leader at the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center . LIFE is an NSF-funded interdisciplinary collaboration between learning scientists at the University of Washington, Stanford University, SRI International, and other institutions across the country.

Steve Hargadon’s Ode To Web 2.0
Steve Hargadon, host of the EdTech Live podcasts and director of the Open Technologies project at The Consortium for School Networking, raised a lot of dust with a long blog post on March 4 called “Web 2.0 Is The Future of Education.” “I believe that the read/write web, or what we are calling web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press,” he wrote.  “I believe that we cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower.”  Comments are welcome.

NSDL at AAAS
It is not too late to register online for the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), to be held February 14-19 in Boston.  You can also register in person. NSDL will be featured in two conference sessions on Sunday the 17th in Room 209 of the Hynes Convention Center. Faculty Collaborative Online Tools and Projects: Lessons from the NSDL is scheduled for 8:30 am, and at 2:15 pm NSDL will hold a Digital Resource Showcase for K-12 Science Education. Both sessions are free and open to the public (no registration required). Come and share ideas with representatives from many NSDL partners. For more information, contact Robert Payo (rpayo AT ucar.edu).

YouTube Delivers One Million Möbius Fans
Möbius Transformations Revealed is a short video by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness, two mathematicians at the University of Minnesota.  It depicts the beauty of Möbius transformations, and it shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity. It was one of the winners in the 2007 Science and Visualization Challenge and was featured along with the other winning entries in the September 28, 2007 issue of journal Science. The video, which was first released on YouTube in June 2007, has been watched there by more than a million viewers so far.

Elemental Expertise: Periodic Table Wiki
One of the jewels in the Chemical Education Digital Library is Periodic Table Live! (PTL). It is a periodic table accompanied by pictures, movies, atomic structures, and more information about the chemical elements. The site also includes tools for sorting and graphing its numerical data. Visitors can contribute information about their favorite elements by using the Periodic Table Wiki, which is listed under Collections on the main page of the ChemEd Collaborative wiki site. If you have special expertise about one or more of the elements, please share it at the Periodic Table Wiki. Even if you don’t want to contribute, you can listen in as a community of chemists and educators get elemental.

Blogs for Teachers Are Succeeding
Last fall, staff at NSDL’s Middle School Portal began making weekly posts to two Expert Voices blogs.  Connecting News With National Science Education Standards helps middle school teachers build lessons around a current news item by linking it to online resources; Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears helps elementary teachers become more knowledgeable about the polar regions while providing best practices on how to integrate polar concepts into their teaching.  After four months, the Connecting Science blog is on track to have 1,000 page views in January. After three months, the Penguins blog is heading for 3,500 page views!

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/educationalfairusetoday.pdf
Three recent court decisions should reassure educators who wonder whether it is legal for them to re-use copyrighted material. In a paper released last month by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Jonathan Band explains recent legal decisions that permit extensive copying and display of copyrighted material on commercial sites because the uses involve “repurposing and recontextualization.” In Perfect 10 V. Amazon.com, the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a thumbnail-sized image of a copyrighted photograph is a “transformative use” and is therefore protected by the fair use privilege by the copyright act. Similar rulings were recently handed down in favor of an artist who re-used portions of a fashion photograph, and a publisher who reproduced copyrighted posters in a book. Band’s paper”Educational Fair Use Today” is available for free download at the ARL website.

Sullivan Honored by Engineering Academy

http://www.nae.edu/nae/awardscom.nsf/weblinks/JMAN-7A4L7N?OpenDocument
Jacquelyn Sullivan, co-PI of Engineering Pathway, has been awarded the 2006 Bernard M. Gordon Prize by the National Academy of Engineering. The $500,000 prize was awarded to Sullivan and co-founder Larry Carlson for their 15-year-old Integrated Teaching and Learning Program, which has become a national model for K-16 engineering education. “The recognition will help our program springboard into the future,” says Sullivan. “We will learn more about how youth form relationships with engineering at an early age, and how hands-on, authentic learning can connect young men and women (especially those under-represented in engineering) with the profession on a personal level.”

Landmark Victory for Open Access

http://www.arl.org/sparc
A three-year lobbying effort by the Open Access movement bore fruit the day after Christmas, when President Bush signed an appropriations bill containing a provision that requires the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide open public access to all of the research it funds. The victory is not complete, according to a January 7 post on the website of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). New NIH research does not have to be published for a year, and the Association of American Publishers has vowed to fight. But the new rule is the first Open Access mandate for a major public funding agency in the US, so it’s a landmark.

Dr. Biology’s NSDL Podcast

Dr. Charles Kazilek, aka “Dr. Biology,” has been explaining life sciences to the general public for the last decade. He has also been making podcasts of half-hour interviews with scientists for the last several years. The 25th in the series describes NSDL, featuring interviews conducted at the Annual Conference with Kaye Howe and Carol Minton Morris from Core Integration; Lee Zia, lead program officer for NSDL at the National Science Foundation; and Samantha Katz, director of education and outreach at the American Academy of Biological Sciences and a staffer for the BioSciEdNet (BEN) Pathway. The podcast offers a lively introduction to NSDL, which Dr. Biology says is “as close to one-stop shopping for learning materials and activities as one can find on the Web today.”

Blog Posts and Dirty Water

A trio of computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University has designed an algorithm with an unusual dual purpose. It can identify how news spreads through the Internet, or how toxins spread through a water system. The Cascades Project is the creation of CMU professor Carlos Guestrin and graduate students Andreas Krause and Jure Leskovec. It uses the property of submodularity to analyze posts in 45.000 blogs, with the time stamps on each blog post determining where news items originated. It also determined the optimal number and placement of sensors for detecting the introduction and spread of contaminants in a municipal water supply. A video lecture explains the process. The team is now focusing on detecting pollution in lakes and rivers, and the optimal placement for stations in citywide wi-fi networks.

Careers In Science: Fieldwork At A Resort
Help Wanted! The Careers in Science Blog, part of NSDL’s Expert Voices, seeks people willing to pursue and share their passions, break through gender stereotypes, and travel and study in interesting places. Careers in Science needs personal stories of experts in their fields and how they were drawn to careers in science and science education. Dr. Rob DeSalle, a researcher in genomics, originally wanted to study whales. He says the best piece of advice he got from his thesis advisor was to choose a research subject that lives in a nice place, “because then you get to go there and collect them.” Rob chose fruit flies (Drosophila), and it so happened that the most fascinating and diverse examples of the species lived in Hawaii. This ongoing conversation is lead by presenters at the upcoming NSDL/NSTA web seminars (above). Materials from LaSalle’s seminar, “Studying Genomes,” are available here.

Strongly Legitimate Words
“Good Word Attacks on Statistical Spam Filters” by Daniel Lowd and Christopher Meek describes a trick spammers use: identifying a list of words considered “strongly legitimate” by spam filters and using those words to mount a “good word attack” on e-mail in-boxes. Here is a sample of good word attacks recently received by the NSDL server:

Farm Patrick Their Sun-drenched Left
Window Aeroplane Alphabet Teeth Car-race Cycle Feather
Skeleton Button Eraser Umbrella Airforce
Bible Button Map Sun Backpack
Milk Bank Shoes Circus Saddle Radar Chess Board
Necklace Torpedo Butterfly Sandpaper Web Robot Girl
Robot Leather Jacket Clown Car Onion
Live Get Fresh-picked In The And
Desk Cappuccino Fork Chess Board Meat
Staircase Feather Insect Bathtub Milkshake
Bee Treadmill Meat Carpet Airforce
Prison Child Record Cycle Planet

Imagine if this kind of creativity was used for something other than selling sub-prime mortgages.

NCore’s Silent Takeover of NSDL
Earlier this year, the platform that powers NSDL changed and very few people noticed. That was what the developers hoped would happen. The new platform, NCore, made NSDL far more flexible because it is based on the Fedora Commons. NCore allows NSDL to add all kinds of next-generation library services and collaborative tools, a process that is now gaining momentum. Dean Krafft and other developers from NSDL’s Core Integration staff described NCore and these tools at an Annual Meeting session entitled “Working with the NSDL 2.0 Data Repository.” One of those new collaborative tools is the NSDL Wiki, which contains a wiki page where developers discuss the many facets of the shift to NSDL 2.0. More information is also available at a November 13 post on the Expert Voices blog “NSDL Highlights.”

Untangling Copyright Confusion
Copyright law is confusing. Whiteboard Report got it wrong in issue #123 when we reported that early sound recordings were in the public domain; the correct answer is “rarely,” according to Peter Hirtle, Intellectual Property Officer for the Cornell University Library. Early recordings were made before federal copyright laws for recordings went into effect, but are still protected by state common law copyrights. The extent of protection available under such laws is unclear, however. Hirtle maintains a chart that illustrates the legal thicket on copyright duration, and his new update reviews the laws on sound recordings and architectural works. Our thanks to him for setting us straight.