With the leadership of the Earth System Science Community Curriculum (ESSCC)Testbed, students as well as the general public will be able to participate in the Mission to Planet Earth. They will be able to review hypermedia scientific publications on the Internet, extract Earth science data from NASA remote-sensing databases in their investigation of global change issues, apply public domain software and transform that data into scientific information and publish their findings on an Internet-based meta-network of digital libraries (WorldWideWeb).
At Gonzaga College High School, with funding from NASA HPCC, ECOlogic Corporation is utilizing the latest advances in networking infrastructure to establish, foster, and evaluate a pilot educational community of high schools and universities devoted to investigation of the Earth system using NASA computational resources. The objective of the community is to develop a scalable Earth System Science community curriculum which facilitates student investigation activities, including project management, expert mentoring, data and meta-data access and analysis, application of collaborative visualization and system modeling tools, synthesis in hypermedia publication on WWW and creation of a community knowledgebase.
After three years of development with educational institutions around the country, the ESSCC will enable students at schools with access to Internet to teach themselves about the Earth system and the scientific process of investigation . The ESSCC testbed will serve as a collaboration, quality-control and problem-solving environment. The technological infrastructure of the ESSCC testbed will be constructed by interconnecting Earth System Science Laboratories in participating schools using high-speed connectivity over the Internet in order to develop a communications and information system and a transparent user interface over the WWW. The ESSCC testbed is the key innovation which will enable diverse members of a community to work together efficiently and openly, leverage the human and technological infrastructure of public science agencies for the benefit of the community's research and move successfully toward self-sustainability.
The Earth System Science Community Curriculum Testbed
keeler@jacks.gsfc.nasa.gov