L.U.C.I.D.: Lectures Using Common Internet Devices

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9978303McPherronThe project will make teaching materials more readily accessible to instructors of space science at the undergraduate and graduate college level. Space science is the study of the interaction of the Sun with planetary magnetospheres, ionosphere's and atmospheres. It is a difficult subject characterized by large, complex, time varying three-dimensional systems that are difficult to visualize. Much of its subject matter is concerned with the interaction of neutral gases made up of charged particles (plasmas) with electric and magnetic field generated by the Sun, planets, and by the particles themselves. There are only a few textbooks available for this field, and specialists write these books for advanced students. Because of a limited market there are almost no teaching aids available to the instructor. To prepare lectures, study units, and student exercises a teacher must have intimate familiarity with the scientific literature to find and interpret images, data plots, drawings, and data files. Outside of major research universities there are few teachers with these skills. Even at these institutions it is a difficult and time consuming task to convert the materials into lecture slides and student study units. The primary goal is to simplify this task by assembling a large indexed collection of teaching materials that can be placed on a CD-ROM. The material will be organized in such a way that it can be viewed with a standard Internet browser on a personal computer. No remote server or Internet connection will be required. The materials will be formatted as HTML documents that contain images, movies, glossary references, citations, and links to other documents. The CD-ROM will not be a book or a study program but will instead be hierarchical database from which an instructor can develop lectures or study units to be distributed to students. Initially the materials will be derived from the lectures prepared by the two investigators. They plan a "shareware" approach in which they trade organized materials with colleagues in return for raw materials or finished documents to add to the database. To facilitate this they will develop a set of guidelines, HTML templates, and a JavaScript library that will allow anyone to convert existing work processor documents and slide presentations to appropriate formats for entry into the database. These will be examined, modified if necessary and added at appropriate points in the database. The CD-ROM will also include a Java based program for selecting and assembling lectures or study units. This program will enable the user to submit a query that selects all documents that contain the terms of the query. The selected documents will be displayed as thumbnails that may be opened if necessary to study detailed contents. Selected documents are added to a shopping cart and the selection process is repeated until all documents relevant to a particular lesson plan have been chosen. At this point the user may rearrange the documents into any order that satisfies his needs. Then a packaging program allows the user to prune links that go beyond the boundaries of the lesson plan. The program next revises hypertext links referenced in the selected documents so they are accessible to the lesson plan. Finally it creates a lesson plan glossary and reference list. The entire package is written into a directory structure that may be downloaded to a student or teacher's computer. At this point an instructor familiar with HTML may modify the package by adding URLs to the ASCII file containing the lesson plan sequence. These may point to new documents added by the instructor or to Internet locations outside the user's computer. Buttons and arrows within the document pages allow the user to step through the lesson plan in the sequence chosen by the instructor. Branches to hyperlinks are supported provided the instructor did not prune them. The final product will be a CD-ROM containing both the space science database and the programs necessary to create stand-alone study units.