NSDL Technical Network Services: A Cyberinfrastructure Platform for STEM Education

NSDL技术网络服务（TNS）项目为NSDL的中心服务提供了一个强大的、可扩展的网络基础设施基础，使广泛的NSF受助者和外部合作伙伴能够共享技术能力，并为他们自己的社区提供有价值的教育工具和资源。该项目有四个主要工作领域：1)参与NSDL和STEM教育社区，培养NSDL及其技术基础设施的共同愿景，并促进广泛的社区贡献；2)使NSDL成为一个共享、协作、贡献的空间，支持围绕网络教育资源创建和展示上下文，以增强发现、使用和理解；3)支持和扩展NSDL核心基础设施，为STEM研究、学习和教育的各个领域的受众实施和开发新的教育应用和网络工具；4)确保NSDL网络及其配套工具和服务对所有用户都是一个健壮、可靠和高度可用的资源。这种努力的智力价值在于它提供了独特的、潜在的变革性的机会，它将来自许多不同机构和项目的广泛的工具、服务、内容和上下文集成到一个知识组织和发现的共同框架中，使其他项目能够完成远远超过它们自己所能完成的工作。通过整合来自许多不同组织、项目和个人的资源、描述、背景和贡献，并提供探索和理解这一知识空间的工具，TNS项目正在成为网络世界中支持网络STEM教育的重要组成部分。这个项目的广泛影响体现在几个方面。首先，通过减少对技术发展的再创造，更多地关注作为教学、指导和支持大量STEM学生和教师的研究的场所，它正在帮助NSF受助者和许多其他相关的教育项目更好地服务于他们的特定受众。其次，它正在建立一个广泛的社区参与过程，以促进创造力、创新，并为下一代教育网络基础设施和交互式学习应用的设计和使用做出贡献。第三，它正在利用NSDL基础设施收集详细的（匿名的）使用和行为数据，为下一代研究提供基础：个性化学习、教育信息推荐引擎、教育社交网络的形成和演变，以及其他需要大量用户生成的行为和活动的领域。

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.