CC* Team: Piloting a CI-Enabled Tribal College and University Research Collaboration

美国印第安人高等教育联盟和机构合作伙伴Sit Bull College、Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College、联合部落技术学院、龟山社区学院、Cankdeska Cikana社区学院和北达科他州州立大学正在合作这个网络团队项目，该项目为基于网络基础设施(CI)的合作奠定了社会技术基础，将支持当前的STEM研究和教育项目，并为积极的研究项目发展提供框架。该项目涉及六个参与机构的教师、学生和IT人员，他们在CI改进、IT人员能力建设和以环境科学为重点的分布式STEM编程方面进行合作，最终包括工程学、数字制造和其他STEM学科。该项目将为所有北达科他州部落学院和大学(TCU)的教职员工和学生提供专业发展、支持、指导和合作研究机会。该项目将增加经济发展的机会，并通过支持传播与信息的基础研究和应用研究，改进卫生、教育和其他服务的设计和提供。该项目的协作能力建设框架实施了联结主义学习模式，在这种模式下，联网的人力和物质资源构成了一个复杂的适应性系统，可持续地产生可操作的知识(包括技术知识和特定领域的知识)。该项目测试了这样一个假设，即连接主义框架可以在建设小型资源挑战机构和组织的研究和教育能力方面具有变革性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The American Indian Higher Education Consortium and institutional partners Sitting Bull College, Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, United Tribes Technical College Turtle Mountain Community College, Cankdeska Cikana Community College, and North Dakota State University are partnering on this Cyber Team project that establishes the socio-technical foundations of a cyberinfrastructure (CI)-enabled collaboration that will both support current STEM research and education programs and provide the framework for aggressive research program development. The project involves faculty, students and IT staff at the six participating institutions collaborating on CI improvements, IT staff capacity-building, and distributed STEM programming focused on environmental science, eventually including engineering, digital manufacturing and other STEM disciplines.The project will provide professional development, support, mentoring and collaborative research opportunities for faculty and students at all North Dakota Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). The project will enhance opportunities for economic development and enhance the design and delivery of health, education, and other services developed through CI-enabled basic and applied research. It will serve as a model for engaging TCUs nationally in the adoption of CI resources necessary to support implementation of a significantly broader range of research and education activities, particularly involving collaborations with the larger research community.The project’s collaborative capacity-building framework implements the connectivist learning model in which networked human and physical resources constitute a complex adaptive system that generates actionable knowledge (both technical and domain-specific) sustainably. The project tests the hypothesis that a connectivist framework can be transformative in building the research and education capacity of small resource challenged institutions and organizations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.