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

9978303 McPherron该项目将使大学本科和研究生院空间科学教员更容易获得教材。 空间科学是研究太阳与行星磁层、电离层和大气层的相互作用。 这是一个困难的主题，其特点是大型，复杂，时变的三维系统，难以可视化。 它的大部分主题是关于由带电粒子（等离子体）组成的中性气体与太阳，行星和粒子本身产生的电场和磁场的相互作用。 只有少数教科书可供这一领域，和专家写这些书的先进的学生。 由于市场有限，教师几乎没有可用的教具。 为了准备讲座、学习单元和学生练习，教师必须非常熟悉科学文献，以查找和解释图像、数据图、图纸和数据文件。 在主要的研究型大学之外，拥有这些技能的教师很少。 即使在这些机构，将材料转换为讲座幻灯片和学生学习单元也是一项困难和耗时的任务。 主要目标是简化这项工作，将大量的教学材料编入索引，放入光盘，材料的组织方式是可以在个人计算机上用标准的因特网浏览器浏览。 不需要远程服务器或互联网连接。 这些材料将被格式化为HTML文档，其中包含图像，电影，词汇参考，引文和其他文档的链接。 该光盘将不是一本书或一个学习计划，而是一个分层数据库，教师可以从中开发讲座或学习单元分发给学生。 最初的材料将来自两位调查员准备的讲座。 他们计划采用一种“共享软件”的方法，通过这种方法，他们与同事交换整理好的材料，以换取原始材料或完成的文档添加到数据库中。 为了促进这一点，他们将开发一套指南、HTML模板和一个JavaScript库，使任何人都可以将现有的工作处理程序文档和幻灯片演示转换为适当的格式，以便输入数据库。 将对这些数据进行审查，必要时加以修改，并在数据库的适当位置加以添加。 该光盘还将包括一个基于Java的程序，用于选择和组装讲座或学习单元。 该程序将使用户能够提交一个查询，选择包含查询项的所有文档。 所选文件将显示为缩略图，必要时可打开缩略图以研究详细内容。 所选择的文档被添加到购物车中，并且重复选择过程，直到与特定课程计划相关的所有文档都被选择。 在这一点上，用户可以重新安排文件到任何顺序，以满足他的需要。 然后，一个打包程序允许用户修剪超出课程计划边界的链接。 程序接下来修改所选文档中引用的超文本链接，以便课程计划可以访问它们。 最后，它创建了一个课程计划词汇表和参考列表。 整个软件包被写入一个目录结构，可以下载到学生或教师的计算机。 此时，熟悉HTML的教师可以通过将URL添加到包含课程计划序列的ASCII文件来修改包。 这些可能指向教师添加的新文档或用户计算机外部的Internet位置。 文档页面中的箭头和箭头允许用户按照教师选择的顺序逐步完成课程计划。 如果教师没有删除超链接的分支，则支持超链接的分支。 最后产品将是一个光盘，其中载有空间科学数据库和建立独立研究单位所需的程序。

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.