RE@L: Research Environments Associated with Learning through Social Networks

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0726023 - Clemson UniversityKrishna MadhavanRE@L: Research Environments Associated with Learning through Social Networks Cyberinfrastructure has revolutionized the world of knowledge production and creation by allowing an increasingly large number of millennial students to participate in this process through extremely easy methods. The project?s vision is to strategically apply middleware technologies in such a way that it provides students at all levels with an unprecedented level of interactivity and access to cyberinfrastructure resources, educational tools, and social support structures. The goal is to utilize middleware tools such that research and education are presented to students within the context of their daily lives, their technology choices, and their lifestyles ? yet in pedagogically sound ways. This will be achieved by integrating current generation of middleware in the context of social networks and by applying middleware technologies for engineering the educational experience.There seems to be a significant divide behind what students today expect of interactive scientific resources for learning and what is provided to them through cyber-environments also known as science gateways. One of the biggest concerns that is raised by the current generation of science gateways is the minimal importance that they place on real-time social, behavioral functions that students as consumers are so used to on a daily basis. Given the exponentially increasing number of wireless, gaming, and interactive commodity services available to consumers and the rapid growth of socially-oriented virtual environments such as Second LifeTM, mySpaceTM, and FacebookTM, the current generation of environments that attempt to bridge discovery and learning seem to lag significantly behind what the millennial students ? and even scientists ? are regularly comfortable with in their daily lives. The potential use of the current generation of middleware technologies within social networks has not been fully understood yet, mostly because middleware has so far been developed mostly from a high performance computing perspective. This project undertakes the comprehensive application and extension of current middleware technologies within the context of social networks. It is proposed to create a virtual organization for education called RE@L within the social network Second LifeTM. RE@L will serve as a prototype to study how compute, data, and other remote resources can be utilized to place learning within environments familiar to students. Cyberinfrastructure itself will be the subject matter of RE@L, students will learn CI using and building CI. We will leverage existing middleware to build a service-oriented architecture to tie in not only compute resources offered by TeraGrid (TG), Open Science Grid (OSG), and the Clemson Campus Grid (running Condor) within the environment, but also link the assessment engine called Samigo, available through the open-source Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment. Furthermore, Second LifeTM offers a robust set of APIs that enable us to expand tools and services easily within its virtual environment. In architecting this integration effort, we utilize results of the NMI award that was made to Goasguen et al. (OCI-0438246), while simultaneously extending it in new directions. Intellectual Merit: The successful completion of this project will demonstrate the application of current middleware technologies within the context of social networks that are not only gaining in popularity, but also are playing a critical role in political and social power. While the results will show that cyberinfrastructure can help us engineer educational environments better, it will demonstrate that work in virtual organizations for education and pedagogy can indeed drive middleware efforts in new directions. This project is for the very first time building appropriate pedagogically focused middleware tools and techniques that will allow us to tailor educational content to specific student learning styles. Broader Impact: This work builds on the philosophy that teaching and learning environments need to leverage cyberinfrastructure more effectively to engineer educational experiences in ways that are more appropriate for the millennial generation. This project could be easily adapted to form the foundation of a cyberinfrastructure-enabled educational strategy that has all the critical ingredients of cutting-edge research at most US institutions of higher education. Moreover, by using a social network that attracts the millennia students, this project has the potential to increase interest and spark new careers in computer science and engineering.