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The role, value, and limits on public-domain S&T data and information in education. Bertram C. Bruce Graduate School of Library and Information Science U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign September 5, 2002. Challenge: How can education cope with change?.
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The role, value, and limits on public-domain S&T data and information in education Bertram C. Bruce Graduate School of Library and Information Science U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign September 5, 2002
Challenge: How can education cope with change? • New technologies for science, industry, communication, transportation, medicine, business, … • Globalization • Immigration • Evolving languages • Shift to knowledge work • Changing social values and organizations
"Turn of the century" changes Possibly greater changes on each of these dimensions at the end of the 19th century • expansion of schooling • progressive education • new subjects • research universities • American library movement
Inquiry-based learning learning tools that are "open-ended, inquiry-based, group/teamwork-oriented, and relevant to professional career requirements” • NSF (1998). Information technology: Its impact on undergraduate education in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology
Bioinformatics • Just as astronomy was transformed through the invention of the optical telescope, and later, the radio telescope, biology is becoming a new science, one which links studies of biochemistry, genetics, cellular processes, anatomy, physiology, and evolution through the structure and properties of macromolecules (Gibas & Jambeck, 2001) • A major tool in this transformation is Biology Workbench (Subramaniam, 1998)
Biology Workbench • Sequence alignment • Visualization • Digital library containing articles, images, sequences, curricula • New knowledge: potassium channels; compare sequences from various cells, tissues, & organisms; insights into the structural correlates of ionic selectivity, permeability regulation, toxin sensitivity • Available since June 1996 • 11,000 registered users; 150,000 computing sessions a month • Biology Student Workbench
Alignment of sequences from horse, chicken, cow, vulture, dogfish, tuna, mole
Open-world learning • open data and problems • open computational environment • open community
Open world investigations • Did Neanderthals and early humans interbreed? • Are fungi more closely related to animals than to plants? • How are whales, dolphins, porpoises, narwhals, and other marine mammals related?
Paul Lock’s class • "Projects in which students have to find things that aren’t covered in the book." • Access to technologies that professional scientists use • Collaborative learning • Articulation of learning
Inquiry unit: How are various cetaceans related? • Analyze the evolutionary history of a group of organisms (whales, porpoises, …) through protein (myoglobin) sequence analysis • Show their evolutionary relationship using phylogenic trees • Present results in a poster session
Challenges & Opportunities • Challenge: Information that is abundant, complex, rapidly changing • Opportunity: • access to resources for inquiry • chance to learn how to cope with complexity • students part of a larger community of inquiry • eliding distinctions between • practice/research • student/teacher • learner/researcher • learning/research
Conclusion • We construct our ideas of what is connected to what • How do each of us acquire the beliefs & values that shape what we see as just, desirable, and feasible? • School and society are intimately related • Access to information is necessary for • the growth of knowledge • for learning • but even more so for building a just and open society