1998 Conference Attendees

ProjectNOAA National Geophysical Data Center
ContactTed Habermann
Email Ted.Habermann@noaa.gov
URL
Project
description		The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) holds one of the largest environmental data collections in the world. The NOAA Data Centers (Climatic http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov, Geophysical http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov, and Oceanographic, see http://www.nodc.noaa.gov) are a primary public interface to these data. Together their web sites support over 2,000,000 users / year. A significant portion of these users are seeking to learn something about the environment or NOAA. My project is to make it easier for them to do that. Current attempts include:
  1. The GLOBE Student Data Archive holds nearly 1,000,000 environmental observations made by students in schools all over the world. Schools can be located in the archive by location or name. The data is available in tabular and graphic formats.
  2. The GLOBE Teacher's Guide started as a 700+ page notebook distributed to all GLOBE Teachers. The on-line version was done using a technology we developed called "WebBook". It allows easy browsing of the contents of the Guide as well as full text searching. This technique is ideally suited to bringing similar static content collections to the web.
  3. The Web Image Spreadsheet Tool was designed to allow easy graphical browsing of large multi-dimensional science data collections. It is build on top of the web and dynamic visualization creation systems that support it. It has been applied to numerous global atmospheric and land data sets, to maps and time series plots of GLOBE Student Data, to weather forecasts, and to temperature time series data.
  4. The Metadata Exploration Tool was designed to allow easy graphical browsing of statistics which describe general characteristics of data sets. This approach allows these data sets to be used to address a broad spectrum of scientific questions appropriate at many educational levels.
  5. The Janet Stevens website explores the artistic creative process of moving ideas from our heads into illustrations and books. This creative process is similar in many ways to that used by scientists and it is easier for many younger children to relate to.
Theoretical
background		The theoretical background for our work has developed ad hoc through interactions with scientists, data providers, teachers and students. These interactions span an very exciting decade of development and include multi-platform CD-ROM's as well as numerous web based activities. We also rely heavily on modern ideas of Information Architecture and Information Design. The goal is to provide structures which help users convert raw data to information that they can use. A recent paper describes how multiple presentations of the same content can support learning from that content in many environments.

I am also interested in the processes which learners use to personalize information and cultivate knowledge. We have addressed several such processes in the NGDC Presentation Creation System which is described to some degree in a recent talk. An interesting thing about these processes is that they are fundamental in both education and in scientific collaboration. The technologies we are developing blur many of the distinctions that might exist between these two areas.

ChallengesTo understand teacher's needs and to create technologies that are actually useful for teachers.
PartnershipWe are interested in developing partnerships with teachers and educational researchers that are interested in collaborating to build the foundation of tools that we have developed into homes for learning communities. We have plenty of data and we know how to use it for science. We need partners to help us understand how to use it for effective learning.