The Co Vis Testbed: A National Science Education Collaboratory

9454729 Pea本提案中的工作建立在通过协作可视化学习（CoVis）项目的基础上，该项目是NSF-AAT测试平台。CoVis侧重于三个领域——项目增强的科学学习、协作和科学可视化——作为转变科学教育的手段。其目标是在高度互动的网络协作环境中使用下一代技术，通过富媒体通信和科学可视化工具来支持学习社区的形成和工作活动。NIE测试平台将把有300名高中参与者的小规模CoVis模型转变为一个大规模的协作实验室，为不同环境下的数千名用户提供服务。在探索教育网络基础设施时，必须认识到“基础设施”不仅仅包括网络连接和传输协议。为了有效，对网络化学习社区的支持需要三个相互依赖的组成部分：技术基础设施、教育内容基础设施以及教师支持和开发基础设施。为了确定成本和结果，试验台还需要一个评价和传播基础设施。该技术基础设施将为学生和教师提供一个支持协作学习的环境，包括视频电话会议、协作软件、视频服务器、互联网工具和开放式科学调查的软件环境。教育资源基础设施将利用技术基础设施，使学生和教师能够查找和交换广泛的交互式多媒体学习材料和科学数据集。这些资源将由教师、学生、UIUC的大气科学家、探索科学博物馆的实践学习专家和其他合作者开发。教师发展和支持基础设施将采取以下形式：由项目工作人员举办的教师研讨会、支持以项目为导向的教学法的材料，以及一个新兴的教师网络社区，在教师转变教学实践的过程中分享他们的经验。测试平台评估和传播基础设施将包括一个结合认知科学、调查方法和案例研究的实质性研究框架，以帮助揭示为教育部署高带宽网络基础设施的挑战，并阐明这些基础设施可以提高科学教育效率的方式。这项研究的结果将通过各种传统和基于网络的机制传播给学校管理者、政策制定者、公司和研究人员。

9454729 Pea The work in this proposal builds on the Learning Through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project, an NSF-AAT testbed. CoVis has focused on three areas - project-enhanced science learning, collaboration, and scientific visualization - as a means for transforming science education. Its goal has been to use next- generation technologies to support the formation and work activities of learning communities with media-rich communication and scientific visualization tools in a highly interactive networked collaborative context. The NIE testbed will transform the small-scale working CoVis model with three hundred participants at the high school level into a large-scale Collaboratory, for thousands of users in diverse settings. In exploring networking infrastructures for education, it is essential to recognize that "infrastructure" consists of more than network connections and transport protocols. To be effective, support for networked learning communities requires three interdependent components: technology infrastructure, educational content infrastructure, and teacher support and development infrastructure. In order to characterize costs and outcomes, a testbed also requires an evaluation and dissemination infrastructure. The technology infrastructure will provide students and teachers with an environment to support collaborative learning that includes video teleconferencing, collaboration software, a video server, Internet tools, and software environments for open-ended science investigations. The educational resources infrastructure will take advantage of the technology infrastructure to allow students and teachers to look up and exchange a broad range of interactive multimedia learning materials and scientific datasets. These resources will be developed by teachers, students, atmospheric scientists at UIUC, specialists in hands-on learning at the Exploratorium Science Museum, and other collaborators. The teacher development and supp ort infrastructure will take the form of workshops for teachers conducted by project staff, materials to support project-oriented pedagogy, and an emerging networked community of teachers sharing their experiences as they transform their teaching practices. The testbed evaluation and dissemination infrastructure will consist of a substantial research framework combining cognitive science, survey methods, and case studies to help expose the challenges for deploying high-bandwidth networking infrastructures for education and clarify the ways in which these infrastructures can improve the effectiveness of science education. The results of this research will be disseminated through a variety of traditional and network-based mechanisms to reach an audience of school administrators, policy makers, corporations, and researchers.