A Model Collaborative Platform for Geoscience Education
Abstract
Over the last decade SERC at Carleton College has developed a collaborative platform for geoscience education that has served dozens of projects, thousands of community authors and millions of visitors. The platform combines a custom technical infrastructure: the SERC Content Management system (CMS), and a set of strategies for building web-resources that can be disseminated through a project site, reused by other projects (with attribution) or accessed via an integrated geoscience education resource drawing from all projects using the platform. The core tools of the CMS support geoscience education projects in building project-specific websites. Each project uses the CMS to engage their specific community in collecting, authoring and disseminating the materials of interest to them. At the same time the use of a shared central infrastructure allows cross-fertilization among these project websites. Projects are encouraged to use common templates and common controlled vocabularies for organizing and displaying their resources. This standardization is then leveraged through cross-project search indexing which allow projects to easily incorporate materials from other projects within their own collection in ways that are relevant and automated. A number of tools are also in place to help visitors move among project websites based on their personal interests. Related links help visitors discover content related topically to their current location that is in a 'separate' project. A 'best bets' feature in search helps guide visitors to pages that are good starting places to explore resources on a given topic across the entire range of hosted projects. In many cases these are 'site guide' pages created specifically to promote a cross-project view of the available resources. In addition to supporting the cross-project exploration of specific themes the CMS also allows visitors to view the combined suite of resources authored by any particular community member. Automatically generated author profiles highlight the contributions an individual has made through any of the projects with an option for customization by the author. An overarching portal site provides a unified view of resources within this diverse set of geoscience education projects. The SERC CMS provides a common platform upon which individual projects can build their own identities, while allowing cross-project pollination and synergies to be realized without significant extra investment by each project. This is a sustainable model for a collaborative platform that takes advantage of the energy and resources of individual projects to advance larger community goals.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFMIN51A1686F
- Keywords:
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- 0810 EDUCATION / Post-secondary education;
- 1960 INFORMATICS / Portals and user interfaces