NSDL Technical Network Services: A Cyberinfrastructure Platform for STEM Education

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The NSDL Technical Network Services (TNS) project is providing a robust and extensible cyberinfrastructure foundation for the central services of the NSDL that enable a wide range of NSF grantees and outside partners to share technical capacity and deliver valuable educational tools and resources to their own communities. The project has four primary areas of effort:1) Engaging the NSDL and STEM education communities to nurture a common vision for NSDL and its technical infrastructure and to foster broad-based community contributions;2) Enabling NSDL to function as a shared, collaborative, contributory space supporting the creation and display of context around networked educational resources to enhance discovery, use, and understanding; 3) Supporting and extending the NSDL core infrastructure for implementing and developing new educational applications and networked tools for audiences across the full range of STEM research, learning, and education; and4) Ensuring that the NSDL network and its accompanying tools and services are a robust, reliable, and highly available resource for all users.The intellectual merit of this effort lies in the unique and potentially transformative opportunity it has to integrate a wide range of tools, services, content, and context from many different institutions and projects into a common framework of knowledge organization and discovery, enabling other projects to accomplish far more than they could have on their own. By integrating resources, description, context and contribution from many varied organizations, projects, and individuals, and by offering tools to explore and understand this knowledge space, the TNS project is serving as an important component of support for cyber-enabled STEM education in a networked world. The broader impacts of this project are felt along several directions. First, it is helping both NSF grantees and many other related educational projects to better serve their specific audiences by focusing less on recreating technical developments and focusing more on serving as sites for teaching, mentoring, and supporting research of large numbers of STEM students and teachers. Second, it is establishing a broad-based community engagement process to foster creativity, innovation, and contributions to the design and use of next-generation educational cyberinfrastructure and interactive learning applications. Third, it is instrumenting the NSDL infrastructure to collect detailed (anonymized) usage and behavioral data, providing the basis for next-generation research into: personalized learning, educationally-informed recommendation engines, formation and evolution of educational social networks, and other areas where large volumes of user-generated actions and activities are needed.