NCSA to Help Provide Better Access to Online Resources
released 10.18.04
Contact
Trish Barker
NCSA Public Information Specialist
tlbarker@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.8013
CHAMPAIGN, IL —
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will join a national team of partners to facilitate access to education materials for computational science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Their four-year effort has received $2.8 million from the National Science Foundation as part of a major effort to provide "user-tailored" access to the National Science Digital Library, an online library of resources for research and education.
The collaborative effort will be led by the Shodor Education Foundation of Durham, North Carolina, which conducts research and educational outreach to advance science and mathematics education. Other partners include Capital University, Clemson University, East Carolina University, the Krell Institute, the LEAD Center, the National Institute for Community Innovation, North Carolina Central University, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
These institutions will collaborate with educators from around the country to collect computational science resources and to make those resources available through the Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD). CSERD was, originally developed through the Education, Outreach, and Training component of the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure program and will now serve as a Pathway to the National Science Digital Library, which holds a wide range of materials to support learning at all levels. Pathways partners provide portals and services needed by users and act as reference librarians for their communities.
"This is a wonderful next phase in NCSA's ongoing partnership with Shodor and the NSDL community to disseminate scientific tools and resources that will directly benefit educators as they work to enhance the math and science content and inquiry-based learning opportunities for all students," said Scott Lathrop, NCSA's associate director of education.
Robert M. Panoff, president and executive director of Shodor and the principle investigator on the NSF grant, emphasized the role of CSERD in aligning research practice and education innovation. "Many numerical models being used to discover new knowledge are accessible from the Web, yet few are intended for use in education," he said. "Even if these models are well constructed and presented, they are often missing the critical materials to link these models to effective curriculum, and state and national standards. CSERD will work to ensure that advances in computational science are made accessible to the math and science classroom."
Members of NCSA's education and outreach team will be responsible for harvesting the results of past EOT-PACI efforts as well as making connections with ongoing research-education efforts in order to preserve their resources in the CSERD. NCSA will work with experts in multiple scientific and engineering fields, including the geosciences and astronomy communities, to identify scientific tools, models, visualizations, and databases that are available and will create scaffolding to make these resources effective for classroom use.
The CSERD project is one of four large NSDL Pathways projects supported by NSF.
For more information about the Computational Science Education Reference Desk, go to http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/.
Shodor and North Carolina Central University will hold a reception and press conference on Monday, Oct. 18 starting at 10 a.m. at the Willis Commerce Building. For information on the reception, contact Robert Panoff at 919-286-1911 or rpanoff@shodor.org.
NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
