Fedora Goes to School: Experiences Creating a Curriculum Customization Service for K-12 Teachers

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Fedora User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-20 01:30 PM – 03:00 PMEducational digital libraries provide a rich array of learning resources uniquely suited to support teachers to customize instruction. The problem we address is how to customize instruction to meet the learning needs of increasingly diverse student populations while ensuring that district learning goals and national and state standards are being met. This tension between supporting customization while supporting standards is further complicated by the challenges of scale: large urban school districts need technology infrastructure to support teachers district-wide to tailor curriculum, while still ensuring fidelity to learning goals. In partnership with Denver Public Schools (DPS), we are using open source digital library infrastructure available through the NSF-funded National Science Digital Library program to create a scalable Curriculum Customization Service. We are building on top of the Fedora-based NCore EduPak, which consists of the NSDL Collection System, the Digital Discovery System, and the NSDL Data Repository. DPS teachers will use this Service to (1) customize curriculum with digital library resources, formative assessments, and district-developed materials to aid student learning, (2) share their customizations as part of an online learning community and professional development program, and (3) discover, remix, and reuse other teachers' contributions. In this presentation, we will describe the Curriculum Customization Service and lessons learned from building an e-learning application supporting instructional planning and collaboration on top of Fedora. The Service uses learning goals as the central organizing concept of the interface. Organized around these are several curricular components including digital versions of the student textbook, digitized components of the associated teachers' guide (formative assessments, teaching tips, instructional resources, and background knowledge readings), and digital library resources. Digital library resources are further broken down by Top Picks (recommended), Images/Visuals, Animations, Additional Activities, and Working with Data. We will also present results from a 10 week pilot study with DPS middle and high school teachers (completed in Fall 2008) and plans for a large-scale, district-wide field study commencing in Fall 2009. In the pilot study, we used interviews, reflective essays, usage logs, and pop-up and email surveys to develop a detailed picture of how teachers were using the Service, and to examine how their usage of the Service changed over the course of the 10 week study. Results suggest the Service offers a powerful model for: (1) embedding digital library resources into mainstream teaching and learning practices and (2) enabling teachers to customize instruction to improve learner engagement and learning outcomes.NS

Creating Reusable Educational Components: Lessons from DLESE

Reuse of educational materials is integral to many educator tasks, from designing a course to preparing for a lab or class. This article describes a study on the reuse of educational materials in the context of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), a community-owned and governed facility offering high-quality teaching and learning resources for Earth system education. The study noted that educational resource designers often do not develop components with reuse in mind, making it more difficult or impossible for other educators to find and use their material, and that the 'findability' and reusability of community-created digital educational resources is highly dependent on the presentational and structural design of the resources themselves. The authors recommend that all resources clearly state the creator's name and contact information, relevant copyright restrictions, the most significant date for the resource (specifying creation or revision), and the intended grade level. Educational levels: Graduate or professional, Graduate or professional, Graduate or professional

Variable Appropriation of an Online Resource Discovery and Sharing Tool

Even when following best practices for participatory design, the appropriation of tools in formal education settings can be hampered by a number of factors. Drawing from a case of a web tool built to help teachers in five school districts find and share free resources in an educational digital library, we describe patterns of tool use and provide some explanations for variability in tool appropriation. We also suggest that future research consider school districts as complex systems of professionals whose interactions and inter-relationships may yield unexpected technology adoption behaviors

Developing a Web Analytics Strategy for the National Science Digital Library

In August 2004, a two-day workshop was held on Developing a Web Analytics Strategy for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) . The workshop was sponsored by the NSDL Educational Impact and Evaluation Standing Committee (EIESC) and was jointly organized with the NSDL Technology Standing Committee (TSC). It brought together 26 representatives from government and industry, as well as some of the projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) NSDL program, to discuss how web metrics could be implemented in a pilot study to identify current NSDL use and develop strategies to support the collection of usage data across NSDL in the future. This new pilot follows a study that the EIESC conducted in 2002 to identify and collect basic web metrics data for NSDL.A bibliography on web metrics was prepared and distributed to the participants of the 2004 workshop. During the workshop, participants first reviewed the processes and technology used to gather web metrics data by two different organizations: the Association of Research Libraries E-Metrics Project and Sun Microsystems. Through a series of breakout and plenary sessions, participants identified high-level goals for the new pilot study, formulated and prioritized a list of desired effects and requirements for collecting web metrics across NSDL, and developed recommendations for implementing web metrics data collection on a project and program level. The workshop concluded with the EIESC and TSC establishing a joint taskforce to lead the pilot study in NSDL over the next year. Web analytics will be used to address two high-level goals. That high quality learning resources be accessible to a large spectrum of the US population That there be value added to users and projects by participating in NSDL.This workshop report provides a brief history of previous evaluation activities across NSDL and discusses the importance of web analytics to NSDL. After a review of the literature on web metrics, the report identifies cross-cutting issues that affect implementing web metrics in the upcoming pilot study (e.g., build vs. buy, data ownership and storage, organizational structure that supports ongoing data collection, user privacy); describes the goals and requirements for the pilot study; and lists near term action items for the joint task force. Documents from the workshop, including a preliminary report entitled Workshop on Web Metrics in NSDL , slides from ARL and Sun Microsystems presentations, participant statements and the web metrics bibliography can be found on the workshop website

Educational Authoring Tools and the Educational Object Economy: Introduction to this Special Issue from the East/West Group

This special issue brings together perspectives from universities and publishers working on new media learning technologies. We begin by describing the way these organizations came to work together, before introducing the articles in this special issue. We then proceed to highlight the important issues that are emerging from their individual and collective efforts within the Group, and most recently from the author-reviewer debate in this issue. We now invite you to build on these discussions with your own contributions. <!-- NO reviewers NO demonstrations --

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals &lt;1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data