We will closely integrate technical support and technology development in the curriculum development process. We will co-develop human techniques and technical functionality so that on-going curricular and technical support responsibilities will be distributed across the community as it expands or are automated to reduce bureaucracy. The architecture and applications deployed in the testbed have already been developed to a degree of sophistication to facilitate parallel management of many on-going projects while accommodating the needs of participants with crowded and typically incompatible schedules. Technical support refers to technology purchasing and set-up assistance each year in the initial roll-out and on-going problem-solving and trouble-shooting of the ESS labs. SURAnet has committed to serve as the primary financial and operational interface to the other regional affiliates who will provide our community schools with the high-speed IP network connection and services which are fundamental to the success of the ESSCC testbed. ECOlogic will work with SURAnet to assure that timely roll-out, installation and assistance is provided to all members. Both the Network Systems Manager (NSM) and the Project Assistant will provide on-call user support by e-mail and phone. These technical support activities will only augment, support, and facilitate the technical activities in the classroom. The ultimate responsibility for maintaining the quality of their technical environment in the ESS lab are the schools, teachers and students. They will work directly with their regional Internet access provider, computer vendors and school communities to establish a support structure for local assistance.
We will develop technology in these three areas: network application development, community memory development, and software development. With the assistance of NASA experts, such as Chris Toomey, Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center and Dr. Mark Rorvig, NASA JSC, and software tools developed by their teams, we will experiment with the deployment of network agents through distributed AI (Toomey and Johnson, 1994) and create a prototype community memory (Ackerman, 1994). The NSM will be responsible for network application development and will provide remote support and develop public domain software tools, such as gopher, WAIS and other distributed information digital library technologies. The NSM will build data collection utilities into the design of the ESSCC testbed and monitor daily statistics on the availability and use of networked hardware and software. These statistics are an essential part of our goal of providing remote maintenance, support and high reliability across the testbed. The same data will be used in evaluation to measure user acceptance of the human-interface (e.g., Diehl & Norman, 1988; Marchionini & Crane, 1994; Shniederman, 1992) and assess the need for network connectivity and additional services. In year 1, participants will standardize the UNIX platform using an SGI workstation to facilitate these efforts. Standardization will also facilitate experimentation with multicast IP and other pseudo-synchronous IP communications technologies (eg. CUSEEME). As the community expands and the communities technical capabilities increase in Year 2 and Year 3, we will support a more heterogeneous userbase, study the communities support requirements in the diversification of UNIX platforms and distribute responsibilities through curriculum design or automation. Moreover, the NSM will work with NCSA to develop Mosaic to enable faculty, students and ECOlogic staff to collect data about usage at the client level. By the third year of the project, evaluation will have optimized the process of collecting user require ments and feeding them into software development and curriculum design (Lin, Liebscher, & Marchionini, 1991). Faculty and students will be able to look at a select set of evaluation data products (statistics, graphs, etc.) which will enable them to gauge the effectiveness of their investigations, collaboration and communication, curricu lum design, and the application of technology (Quarterman, 1994).
The data processing manager (DPM) will develop a data processing system which will function as a community memory , a knowledgebase to enhance the productivity and capability of classroom investigation. Our goal here is to facilitate student and faculty use of data, visualization and modeling tools and make the interactions of students, faculty and mentors maximally effective. The community memory can be construed as a meta-database for community activities. This recognizes that high school and university education represents a highly diversified and distributed customer base, which is significantly less technical than the focus customer base of EOSDIS, USGCRP researchers. This effort will be fundamental to the community's goal of self-sustainability. The DPM will apply the latest public-domain client-server (gopher and Z39.50 applications, such as full-text information retrieval software, WAIS) and integrate a structured E-mail system for the benefit of community problem-solving and procedure automation. As in the MIT Answer Garden, community memory allows organizations to develop databases of commonly asked questions that grow "naturally' as new questions arise and are answered. (Ackerman, 1994) Development of a system as sophisticated as the Answer Garden is beyond the scope of this project; we will use it as a model. However, we would like to move beyond statistical mapping of word occurrences and co-occurrences and include inferencing functionality, querying with a subject and preference profile. By the third year, we intend to develop a searchable system which grows as it documents episodes of human interactions by e-mail in the on-going problem-solving efforts of the community (on-line help, tips, techniques...). In this way, the content of the system will be constructed by and for the community who uses it, making it easier for non-technical audiences to use NASA data in their own scientific investigation. The community will be able to use this system to leverage its own experiences to advance and optimize student investigation. Above all, we want to develop something which works and is really useful to the community.
The Earth System Science Community Curriculum Testbed
keeler@jacks.gsfc.nasa.gov