Community Curriculum Development

The ECOlogic management team will coordinate and manage the curriculum development and instructional design processes in three ways: (1) Focusing the community investigation on the community research questions over the course of a year through guided experimentation, evaluation, and curriculum revision. (2) Continuing the development of our ESSCC, a widely-distributed WWW-based application which serves as the backbone of the ESS community curriculum. The challenge here will be the design and development of a community-wide human-computer interface which provides structure and openness. (3) Development and integration of an information and communications system, a logical meta-network dependent on the Internet, which supports human activities across the community and provides participants, especially faculty and ECOlogic project staff, with relevant feedback about community activity, such as data products about community communications and usage. Greg Crist, the project manager, will work full-time coordinating curriculum development activities, especially in the areas of interface design and community-wide hypermedia publications.

Curriculum development will be treated as a community-wide investigation. Each year the investigation will focus on a new set of related questions which deal with the fundamental issues facing the community in their effort to develop curriculum at the community-scale. The community will focus on one question for each of the following fundamental issues: science content, instructional design and evaluation, technology, planning, support programming, and policy and standards. Each year the set of questions is designed to direct and structure the curriculum development process and provide the community with a sense of cohesion. Each set of questions is organized around a thematic goal for each year which build on each other in sequence to move the community's curriculum development effort forward on schedule.

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In Year 1, Formative Development in the Classroom, the community investigation will focus on developing curriculum to enable student-team investigation of Earth system science. Faculty and students will become oriented to the in-class syllabus and activities, the application of tools and intimate familiarity with the ESS community. Faculty will conduct a formative evaluation and involve their school in classroom activities. The ECOlogic team will conduct a formative evaluation of community curriculum development, and report findings to the National Advisory Panel.

In Year 2, Communication and Collaboration for Systemic Change, the community investigation will focus on fostering and encouraging collaboration and communication across traditional educational, scientific, psychological, and socio-economic boundaries by developing institutional relationships in support of curriculum requirements. Faculty will develop a five-year strategic plan for their science and math departments and address the role of technology. Faculty and the community will begin to study the strategies and costs of integrating the ESS lab into the existing human and information infrastructure of the school.

In Year 3, Self-sustainability and Decentralization, the community investigation will focus on developing a strategy for adapting the ESSCC testbed model to their region. Faculty will work with the faculty of other schools and universities, regional businesses and government agencies to develop a plan to establish regional research consortia. The community investigation will begin to address the scalability of the curriculum. Using data collected throughout the scale-up process, the community will begin to understand the costs and benefits of various implementation strategies. By documenting a variety of implementation strategies which work, the curriculum can accommodate a diversity of resource portfolios, addressing information infrastructure, technical expertise, finances, and time over the three year funding period. This aspect of the study will address equity in the distribution of resources and responsibilities, and equality of access to information resources. The community will also address costs and benefits of decentralization and commercialization of basic operations. This investigation will include a comprehensive review of the size and needs of an expanding user base, forecasts of the expected user base, and the management and technology requirements to support that user base and scale beyond the testbed community. After the three year grant period, thirteen high schools, six university faculty and nearly 500 students will have formally participated. The community will make the transition into a self-sustainable, growing community, largely supported by the intellectual investment of the research, documentation, automation and design of the preceding years.

The challenge of designing a community-wide human-computer interface will be addressed using techniques developed for Ecologica. We provide students with a standard project format which outlined the project . The format is 'standard' in that it can be broadly applied to ESS themes in an open-architecture approach. In no more that a page, the standard project format identifies the major theme of the project; presents a broad thematic question; an objective statement; an abstract; and relevant books, articles, and computational resources, including pointers to NASA data archives accessible over the Internet or CD-ROM.

Most importantly, the standard format includes a process of investigation which served as a standard structure for coordinating team activity and communication. (NCSESA, 1993) The process of investigation presents team activities visually and in text, indicating both sequence and simultaneity. By mapping the human interactions we observed in the classroom, we created a visual tool to structure, schedule and refine the human activities and communications surrounding a student project. (Tufte, 1990) Human interactions mapping results in a visual representation (a map) of the process of investigation which student teams use as a guide, on a project by project basis. In the classroom, the map serves as a useful interface to the activities of the curriculum. Team activities include background research, hypothesis formulation and qualitative modeling, background report, data sourcing and research, data visualization and quantitative modeling, and scientific communication, which consists of three steps: oral presentations and peer review, editing, and publishing scientific findings on the World-Wide Web (WWW). 9 K

Human interaction maps, demonstrated in the process of student investigation make human activities and relationships explicit through visual (often iconic and diagrammatic) representation.(Michon, 1992) Human interactions maps will form the backbone of the ESS community curriculum implementation. These maps attempt to define, reveal, guide and refine the processes of the curriculum: human activities, human communications flows, information flows and human interactions with tools and resources. Human interaction maps will be the central means of coordinating and managing curriculum development activities.(Laurel, 1990) To scale from the classroom to the community, we have developed human interactions maps which define the stream of activities which will be carried out by all members of the community in synchronization with the process of student investigation. (Tufte, 1990) Project managers, teachers, scientist mentors and others will be able to pursue streams which guide and prompt their activities in relation to student team activities. Because the project management activity is depicted in relation to the process of student investigation, the student has an explicit understanding of when to conduct an activity and how it relates to the teams investigation. Human interactions maps revolve around student investigation and serve as a guide to community relationships and activities, bringing a sense of cohesion and unity of purpose. (Kahin, 1992)

The Earth System Science Community Curriculum Testbed

keeler@jacks.gsfc.nasa.gov