Virtual Pond

Virtual Ponds In A Digital Ocean

Jim Myers

Peter Wodruff

Buzz Hoagland

We envision a system of locally-produced student-generated data (Virtual Ponds) that are linked into a national registry (Digital Ocean). These local data will be housed in a system that retains local identity and integrity. Selected local data will be ported to a higher tier in the system after student peer-review. Local data need to have the appearance of being local to locals, and also be transparent to a larger community.

Digital libraries enable sharing at the national and international scale and promise to revolutionize the quality and quantity of educational resources avalable to students and educators. With resources online, it makes sense to consider moving related activites online - assembling curricula, taking notes, asking questions, sharing analyzed data and visualizations, to presenting final results for peer review. Indeed, many libraries projects are developing mechanisms to support such activities. However, it is not clear that such activities can be done effectively at the same national scale. Student (and educator) creativity can be suppressed when the path ahead of them appears well trodden (10,000 peer reviewed student reports on this project are already online). Similarly, while contributing to a global effort can be exciting, it can limit people's willingness to risk failure, and consequently can end up denying them the chance to learn from mistakes. The sense of a trusted community, and the ability to rely on agreements concerning directions and divisions of labor can be critical in enabling exploratory work.

We believe that, conceptually, what is needed are "virtual ponds" in the digital library "ocean" that can nurture explorers by providing a sense of community and visible horizons - a world whose scale challenges without overwhelming. By making the ponds "virtual", "big fish" can easily explore further into the digital lakes and seas with the sense of mastery developed in their smaller community. In practice, this leads to a model of digital library use where smaller groups can filter information flowing into and out of their community - allowing access to raw data but not analyses from other projects, performing an internal peer review before releasing data and reports to the larger world, etc.

Other thoughts...

A variety of technologies are making such a system possible - portals, portlets, metadata/data translation/filtering mechanisms...

Such ponds could perform an interesting service for the larger libraries - by defining the pedagogy, level of learners, etc. of the commonity at startup and recording the success of the efforts, it would become possible to associate such information with the digital library resources used within the project. Such in-depth, real-world, evaluation of coherent sets of resources could potentially be much more valuable than individual pre-release reviews of individual resources submitted to the library...