[Whiteboard-subscribers] Whiteboard Report #125, 11/14/07

[Brad Edmondson]

NSDL WHITEBOARD REPORT #125

Whiteboard Report news is on the Web at http://NSDL.org and http:// 
expertvoices.nsdl.org/whiteboardtalkback. Back issues are available  
at http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue--Archive.php.

November 14, 2007

NEWS

What Happened at the Annual Meeting?

http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/roadreports
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/nsf_view
NSDL’s Annual Meeting last week attracted 200 passionate digital  
omnivores who learned about 117 projects by viewing 59 posters and  
attending 34 sessions in less than two days in Arlington, VA.  
Remnants from that intellectual explosion can be viewed at the  
meeting’s home page, which contains the program, abstracts of the  
posters, a survey where attendees can state their preferences for  
future conferences, and a list of attendees. You can see more at the  
“Road Reports” page in NSDL’s Expert Voices blogosphere, which  
contains descriptions of various panel discussions, an elegy for Bob  
Peck Chevrolet, and a thoughtful review by conference veteran Susan  
Jesuroga. And don’t miss the new blog from Lee Zia, Lead Program  
Director for NSDL at the National Science Foundation, which begins  
with his newest set of Annual Meeting Haikus.

NCore’s Silent Takeover of NSDL

http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/Community:NCore
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/highlights
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 operating system. 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,  
and the link above takes you to a wiki page where developers discuss  
the many facets of the shift to NSDL 2.0. More information is  
available at a November 13 post on the Expert Voices blog "NSDL  
Highlights."

DLConnect Shares Workshop Materials

http://dlconnect.usu.edu

The "Digital Libraries Go To School" project and DLConnect have been  
conducting different kinds of professional development workshops,  
both on and off line, to help teachers and librarians learn and  
integrate NSDL resources into their teaching. Now the materials they  
use for pre-service, one-hour, and two-day training sessions are  
available online, along with a tour of their popular Instructional  
Architect (IA) program and samples of learning activities created by  
teachers and the IA.  Get to the materials by going to the link  
above, clicking on "teachers," then clicking on the subcategory  
"resources."

Untangling Copyright Confusion

http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain.

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.

This Day in Technology

http://www.k-grayengineeringeducation.com
The Engineering Pathway’s latest feature is a database of engineering  
and technology events for every day of the year. Currently, the  
Pathway’s "Today in History" events are displayed in the news area  
under the left navigation bar. Most days have more than one event ,  
so one event is randomly displayed with each refresh. Discipline- 
specific events are displayed on the Computer Science Education and  
Engineering Education Disciplinary Community pages as well. The  
events are accompanied by a daily blog that gives more details on the  
events and relates them to educational resources in the Engineering  
Pathway. Information bits like these are the perfect size for porting  
to PDAs and cell phones. If you’ve spent time lately around people  
who are waiting to board an airplane, you know that this is what’s next.

BOOKMARKS

NSF Award to Content Clips
http://www.contentclips.com

McLean Media has received a new NSF Outreach and Communication grant  
through the Research on Gender in Science and Engineering program.  
The "Telling STEM Stories through Content Clips" project will present  
the stories of diverse women scientists for an audience of grades 4  
through 8. Content Clips were partly developed through an NSDL  
Targeted Research study, and they dynamically incorporate diverse  
resources from distributed digital libraries into online  
presentations. Principal investigators for the project are Lois  
McLean and Rick Tessman.

Science Education that Makes Sense

http://aera.net
Research Points is a quarterly newsletter published by the American  
Educational Research Association (AERA).  The Summer 2007 issue  
focuses on science education, and it calls on policymakers to  
“provide funds so that schools can use today's powerful technologies  
to support visualization of scientific phenomena.” The report adds,  
“By making sophisticated use of technology, science courses can  
provide visualizations of complex phenomena that help students  
connect school science to everyday situations.” Extensive research  
citations are given. The newsletter can be downloaded from AERA’s  
home page.

OAI-ORE Open Meeting

http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/ore-hopkins-press-release.pdf
http://www.regonline.com/oai-ore
A meeting will be held on March 3, 2008 at Johns Hopkins University to
roll-out the first beta release of the specifications for Open  
Archives Initiative -
Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE).  These specifications describe a  
data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources,  
and the encoding of the data model in the XML-based Atom syndication  
format. Registration is required and space is limited.

Child Protection in a Web 2.0 World

http://www.fosi.org/conference2007
The first conference and trade show of the Family Online Security  
Institute will be held on Thursday, December 6, 2007 in Washington,  
DC.  An opening panel will feature federal communications officials  
from the United States, Australia, and the UK discussing the  
challenges of regulating Internet content for child protection. A  
trade show later that day will will showcase online safety  
technologies from around the world.  The Family Online Security  
Institute (FOSI) is a new trade association that bills itself as “the  
place where technology and policy stakeholders meet in the field of  
family online safety, while respecting the free expression rights of  
content providers.”

INSPIRATION

Exploratorium in Second Life

http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2006/index.html
http://www.exploratorium.edu/worlds/secondlife
On March 29 2006, the science museum Exploratorium created an event  
on the site SecondLife.com. The avatars of 70 people gathered in a  
virtual copy of a Turkish ampitheater from 200 A.D., the same site  
where an actual solar eclipse was being filmed by NASA, to watch the  
eclipse on their screens and trade comments. “There was a great  
moment when the screen showed the ampitheater, which was full of  
Turkish children looking at the eclipse through sunglasses,” says Rob  
Rothfarb, the museum’s director of web development.  “The Second Life  
version showed avatars in a virtual copy of the site looking at real  
people in the real site.”

NSDL Whiteboard Report describes research, news, and notes from the  
National Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Education Digital  
Library (http://NSDL.org), which is funded by the National Science  
Foundation. Whiteboard is published bi-weekly and includes  
information from NSDL projects and programs nationwide. Please  
redistribute. To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit http://nsdl.org/ 
publications/?pager=signup.

Whiteboard Report is edited by Brad Edmondson (gbe2 at cornell.edu).  
Project leaders and participants from the NSDL community are  
encouraged to send the editor research news and notes of interest.  
Please limit these items to 200 words or less and provide web links  
to additional information.

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is the nation's online  
library of resources for science, technology, engineering, and  
mathematics education and research.
NSDL would like to thank the National Science Foundation for its  
generous support and advocacy of NSDL as the NSF digital library of  
science education. This material is based upon work supported by the  
National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0227648, 0424671, and  
0227888. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations  
expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not  
necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.









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