LuAnn Dahlman

Making Earth Science Data Accessible and Usable in Education

The Earth Exploration Toolbook provides instructions on accessing and analyzing Earth science data to explore scientific concepts and issues. To enable responsible decision-making in the future and to ensure the development of the next generation of scientists, students must develop the skills that enable them to explore scientific questions, assess the results of scientific research, and draw and communicate conclusions to others. These skills are essential as society faces science and engineering challenges, including the need to understand and respond to the impacts of changes in Earths climate.

Geoscience Data for Educational Use: Recommendations from Scientific/Technical and Educational Communities

ABSTRACT Access to geoscience data has been difficult for many educators. Understanding what educators want in terms of data has been equally difficult for scientists. From 2004 to 2009, we conducted annual workshops that brought together scientists, data providers, data analysis tool specialists, educators, and curriculum developers to better understand data use, access, and user-community needs. All users desired more access to data that provide an opportunity to conduct queries, as well as visual/graphical displays on geoscience data without the barriers presented by specialized data formats or software knowledge. Presented here is a framework for examining data access from a workflow perspective, a redefinition of data not as products but as learning opportunities, and finally, results from a Data Use Survey collected during six workshops that indicate a preference for easy-to-obtain data that allow users to graph, map, and recognize patterns using educationally familiar tools (e.g., Excel and Google Earth).

The Earth Exploration Toolbook: Facilitating Access to Scientific Data and Tools

In order to effectively make Earth science data accessible, usable, and useful by the educational community it is clear that there needs to be a spectrum of services and resources that address the obstacles and support the efforts starting from the research scientist and ending with the student. We describe resources and services here that address a number of components of this spectrum. The Earth Exploration Toolbook (EET, http://serc.carleton.edu/eet) is an online resource that contains chapters, each of which provides step-by-step instructions to walk users through an example of using data and tools in a way that is relevant and interesting to the teachers and students. We developed a mechanism to support the development of new EET chapters, offering scientists an effective mechanism to provide their data, analysis tools, and scientific knowledge to the educational community. In addition, we piloted a professional development workshop series to facilitate the use of EET chapters by teachers. We have found that providing scientists with a partnership and mechanisms that help them facilitate the use of their data, analysis tools, and scientific knowledge by the educational community is very effective, and that providing professional development for the use of EET chapters is very important for facilitating the use of scientific data and analysis tools in education..

Facilitating the effective use of earth science data in education through digital libraries: bridging the gap between scientists and educators

Creating learning modules that utilize Earth data is a difficult task, requiring knowledge about the data, science, curriculum design, and the educational context. The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Data Services group hosted a workshop to bridge the knowledge gap between data providers and educators by assembling teams of experts in these areas to create data-rich learning modules. Face-to-face collaboration allowed the sharing of perspectives and encouraged the contribution of individual expertise, facilitating development of data-rich modules