May 22005

Meeting Notes for SEEK Meeting Monday May 2, 2005

Action Items

send out email to working group to vote on proposed seminar format and structure
gather background information on approaches
identify individuals to teach proposed seminar
confirm proposed conference call meeting scheduled for two weeks

Notes

The distributed Graduate Seminar is scheduled for Spring 2006.

Background on Distributed Graduate Seminars

NCEAS has had considerable success in conducting courses/seminar that are held concurrently across multiple institutions. These seminars are typically cover topics that are scalable biological/ecological question. Typically individual institutions conduct student led projects cover a regional research question. These institutions then meet at the end of the semester to synthesize the regional data at a national level. Students from each institution are chose to go to NCEAS for this final analysis.

For additional information please go to KNB Education

The initial idea for the SEEK distributed graduate seminar is to be structurally similar to the KNB seminars. Problem based, with a real world application.

The question is how much should we introduce the SEEK tools?
What are the goals and objects for the course?
What is the benefit to the students and the SEEK project for conducting a seminar of this nature?

The proposed course should familiarize student with the concept of ecoinformatics provide skills for collaboration

In answering these questions a more clearly defined course format and structure needs to be defined. participants were asked to propose research questions that student could conduct projects on within either a 16 week or 10 week course. The following questions were proposed:

Does the relationship between biodiveristy and productivity hold true as you move up through higher taxon ranks due to phylogentic conservatism.
Draw on taxon records from museums with good databases use for niche modeling exercise
Sensor network --deal with the issue of data integration and issues of hetergeneous sensor platforms.
Population modeling course in which students learn tools like r through kepler. The course would be more of a pedagogical "toolkit" approach rather than a research approach. Students would start with some standards models and workflow theory, go through some demos running workflows in kepler, learn how to create models in kepler and then create their own executable workflows in kepler. The technology would be the linking factor across institutions. Individual institutions could share; evaluate models.

The important issue in defining the course format and structure is determining instructures willing to teach said course.

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This page last changed on 19-May-2005 11:25:40 PDT by LTER.sromanello.