Discover Life |
Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative |
Utricularia subulata L.
Zigzag Bladderwort
Updated: 14 December, 2006
Discover Life |
The challenge The rapid ability of computers to recall, analyze, and share vast quantities of information is a grand challenge to our educational system. What skills do humans need to prosper in tomorrow's workforce and not be replaced by machines? Consider existing and future knowledge -- the known and the unknown. With the advent of the Internet, machines can now assemble, process, and immediately globalize the digital world. Memorization is suddenly becoming an outdated, inefficient use of brain power. Humans cannot out-google Google in regurgitating the known. Our educational system has yet to respond. Students still memorize mounds of information for tests. Instead we need to teach them how to recall, filter, and analyze information with their finger tips, put their minds to creative use, and learn problem-solving and synthetic skills. Here we embrace a paradigm shift -- let's move beyond teaching the known and empower people to discover and understand the unknown. |
A classroom of unknowns The wonders and mysteries of plant communities offer a global outdoor classroom full of unknowns. We propose to integrate software tools, databases, and protocols for students and citizen scientists to conduct inquiry-based research in this natural laboratory. We will challenge them to discover what is known and unknown about the plants they find exploring schoolyards, neighborhoods, and other outdoor areas. The proposed cyberinfrastructure will let them step beyond memorization and develop creative skills needed to succeed in a flat, automated world. |
Teaching through research We will tightly link our education efforts to original research on plants. The proposed cyberinfrastructure will allow us to integrate teaching and research at an unlimited number of schools and other study sites. Our educational goal is that all participants will individually learn thinking and technical skills in conducting local studies. They will learn to do creative science and not be cogs in a reseach network. Collectively, their findings across study sites will address a grand research challenge in ecology -- to understand and predict species richness, abundance, distribution, and community interactions in response to biotic and abiotic factors, such as invasive species and global climate change. |
Ensuring data quality The goal of citizen science projects often is to teach rather than to do science per se. Consequently, their data may be of poor quality and little scientific use. Fortunately, this need not be so. We will develop rigorous checks and balances to ensure that sufficient, high-quality, replicated data are collected across sites to be valuable to professional scientists, land managers, and policy makers. Participants will photograph and voucher specimens so that we can verify species identifications, for example. We will use software to cross-check data, rank potential quality, and filter out mistakes and unreliable individuals. |
Organizational structure Our proposed education and outreach program centers around the website Discover Life and its non-profit umbrella organization, The Polistes Foundation. John Pickering, the President of Polistes and a faculty member at the University of Georgia, will coordinate this effort. At an indirect cost of 5%, The Polistes Foundation will serve as the fiduciary for distributing funds to collaborating educators and outreach specialists at participating herbaria, schools, and other institutions.
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