October 30, 2003
Internet2 growth creates digital lab notebook, other learning opportunities
It took 2½ decades for the benefits of the original Internet to diffuse broadly into the education community. But now, a growing movement is determined to encourage innovation across all education sectors, to take advantage of Internet2 sooner rather than later.
Research universities are playing a central role in this diffusion model. They are often the sponsors of other institutions — K-12 schools, community colleges, libraries, and museums — that wish to join Internet2. They also are the source of much early innovation, providing some of the “bait” for attracting other educators to the high-speed network.
Heading the National Internet2 K20 Initiative is Louis Fox, UW vice provost for educational partnerships & learning technologies. He says there are four key steps that the initiative is pursuing to grow this network:
- Identifying a critical mass of innovative practitioners in the educational community who have the necessary technical infrastructure and support.
- Identifying projects using Internet2 that resonate with these innovators.
- Developing a community and culture where innovation can thrive.
- Providing technical support and expertise for these early innovators to bring these projects to classroom, libraries, and cultural institutions.
So far, only about 12 percent of America’s public elementary and secondary schools have Internet2 connections. But Fox is encouraged by the rate of growth. “Connecting state education networks is the most effective route to bring the largest number of institutions into the Internet2 as quickly as possible,” he says.
In two years since the initiative began, 30 state education networks have been connected, with an additional five to 10 networks expressing interest in connecting in the future. “This is a response that surprised us all,” Fox says.
In its first two years, the K20 Initiative has created a communications infrastructure and developed a leadership group that is capable of stimulating and supporting innovation within the community, and has organized working groups and discussions in all participating states as well as national forums that bring innovators from across the education community together around common projects. Its Web site, http://www.internet2.edu/, serves as a place for innovators to meet and discover projects in which they can participate.
The next phase, Fox says, is “focusing more closely on driving opportunity to individual institutions and stimulating the development of communities around those opportunities.”
The UW has played numerous roles in the K20 effort. The UW’s vice president for computing and communications, Ron Johnson, who is a member of the policy group that guides Internet2’s activities, was a strong advocate for connecting state education networks. Washington State’s K20 Education Network was among the very first state networks to be connected to the national research and education network, called Abilene, run by Internet2. It was sponsored in these efforts by the UW and assisted by UW’s computing & communications.
More recently, the UW has contributed some provocative ideas for projects that could become popular in the broader educational community. Labscape, for example, was developed by members of the Cell Systems Initiative. It grew out of a desire to provide more information management support for the data that is created in a typical biology laboratory.
“The question we began with was, Can we take lab procedures and describe them in a series of simple steps?” says Lisa Jenschke, project manager for online education. “So, we created a ‘language’ with just eight words that describe most common laboratory procedures. We made these into icons. At each step in the process, you can attach information to the icons — a worksheet, description, hypothesis, drawing, Web page — whatever you need to describe what is happening in greater detail.”
In the laboratory, Labscape, www.csi.washington.edu/teams/labscape/index.html, has the potential of replacing the ubiquitous laboratory notebook. “We realized this would be a powerful learning tool for students as well as something that scientists in the lab could use,” Jenschke says. “For students we have a somewhat simplified version with fewer layers. They are able to do their own experiments in Labscape, as they would do in class, designing their own protocols and testing their own hypotheses.”
Labscape can serve as a laboratory simulation since the simple interface connects to a wealth of data on what would be the result of each step in the experiment.
For many students, Jenschke says, this is a superior way to learn, because students don’t get bogged down in the physicality of laboratory experiments when what their instructors want them to learn is concepts.
CSI chose Ballard High School as a pilot site for testing Labscape because it was the first Seattle school to be connected to the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, the region’s access point to Internet 2. The high-speed connection is necessary because data is transferred from Ballard to CSI in real time, as students are writing their protocols and performing their experiments online. Labscape is connected to an extensive database — a library of experiments — that supports the protocols students develop.
Initial development of Labscape was supported by funds from Microsoft and Intel; more recently, it received funding from the National Science Foundation. Now, Labscape is about to go commercial. The UW has licensed a local company, Teranode, to develop Labscape as TeraLab both for the scientific community and for use in education.
“Our hope is that the licenses for commercial applications will support the educational uses,” Jenschke says. “Students think the concept is great. It translates many written pages of laboratory notes into a much easier to understand visual representation.”
Labscape will have a second pilot site, at Renton High School, this year.
Another K20 project comes from staff at the Center for Environmental Visualization, www.cev.washington.edu, in the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, who have created eye-popping simulations of processes in the ocean and atmosphere that would be sure to fire the imagination of K-12 students. The center’s primary work has focused on the creation of visual representations for the scientific community as a way to deliver complex information in computer simulations. But it’s clear the potential applications go well beyond communicating with scientists.
“Many in academia have an interest in communicating exciting science to broader audiences,” says Mark Stoermer, CEV staff member. “You can take a scientific model, developed from observational data, and create a four-dimensional animation (a three-dimensional representation that evolves over time) that is accessible to broad audiences. We know that younger students already have many of the computer capabilities to appreciate these simulations.”
The availability of Internet2 bandwidth makes possible the delivery and use of large sets of information and large scale visualizations. It also raises the tantalizing possibility of making these multi-dimensional models interactive. “Students won’t just be observing the ocean, but interacting with it,” Stoermer says. “Moreover, you can be anywhere and use these tools to study such subjects as the ocean’s role in climate, the role of hydrothermal vents in sustaining life and the productivity of the seas. Ocean observatories can be operated in a Kansas classroom as well as they can in Seattle.”
For example, students can follow large ocean migrations, using data generated by censuses of marine life. “Elephant seals may migrate thousands of miles, making repeated dives to extreme depths, sometimes as deep as 5,000 meters,” Stoermer says. “The students will be able to see it all, as well as the interactions between animals and the environment.”
Many of the tricks that CEV designers employ are based on idioms that are familiar to younger students from computer games. “Our approach could allow students to ‘go’ on and participate in the kinds of explorations that have actually occurred,” he says. The combination of networked databases, high-definition computer graphics and an educational game “engine” can allow projects to become part of a compelling science curriculum anywhere in the country, given the proper bandwidth. And the simulations give students a much greater sense of being there than has been possible before.
“The UW School of Oceanography has operated the REVEL, www.ocean.washington.edu/outreach/revel/, project for a number of years, in which they take science teachers from across the country on oceanographic Research Vessel (R/V) Thompson to explore undersea fields of hydrothermal vents,” Stoermer says. “But we’re not able to take entire classrooms on the ship. What we can do with our models is allow students to take their own trips on a virtual R/V Thompson, controlling the exploration, and making their own observations.”
As Project Neptune, www.neptune.washington.edu, which aims to locate arrays of sensors on the ocean floor off the British Columbia, Washington and Oregon coast, develops, there is the possibility of involving students in another area of cutting edge science, allowing them to tap into the growing archive of ocean observational data by programming virtual vehicles and data collection devices, thus manning their own undersea explorations.
Stoermer is optimistic that the center’s prototypes and proposals will make their way from the laboratory to the classroom. An office for the Ocean Observatories Initiative at the National Science Foundation is being formed that will have an education and outreach component. UW researchers hope to be in on the ground floor.
“It’s important to start the design cycle now,” he says, “and to test what we’re doing with targeted user groups. There’s a lot of great new technology that has never been used in the classroom.”
