The role, value, and limits on public-domain S&T data and information in education

Bertram C. Bruce

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

September 5, 2002

Challenge: How can education cope with change?

• New technologies for science, industry, communication, transportation, medicine, business, …

• Globalization• Immigration• Evolving languages• Shift to knowledge work• Changing social values and organizations

"Turn of the century" changes

Possibly greater changes on each of these dimensions at the end of the 19th century

– expansion of schooling – progressive education– new subjects– research universities– American library movement

Inquiry-based learning

learning tools that are "open-ended, inquiry-based, group/teamwork-oriented, and relevant to professional career requirements”

– NSF (1998). Information technology: Its impact on undergraduate education in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology

Inquiry Page

Bioinformatics

• Just as astronomy was transformed through the invention of the optical telescope, and later, the radio telescope, biology is becoming a new science, one which links studies of biochemistry, genetics, cellular processes, anatomy, physiology, and evolution through the structure and properties of macromolecules (Gibas & Jambeck, 2001)

• A major tool in this transformation is Biology Workbench (Subramaniam, 1998)

Biology Workbench

• Sequence alignment• Visualization• Digital library containing articles, images, sequences, curricula• New knowledge: potassium channels; compare sequences from

various cells, tissues, & organisms; insights into the structural correlates of ionic selectivity, permeability regulation, toxin sensitivity

• Available since June 1996• 11,000 registered users; 150,000 computing sessions a month• Biology Student Workbench

Single site mutation in hemoglobin

Structural consequences

Alignment of sequences from horse, chicken, cow, vulture, dogfish, tuna, mole

Phylogenetic tree

Open-world learning

• open data and problems

• open computational environment

• open community

Open world investigations

• Did Neanderthals and early humans interbreed?• Are fungi more closely related to animals than to plants?• How are whales, dolphins, porpoises, narwhals, and other marin

e mammals related?

Paul Lock’s class

• "Projects in which students have to find things that aren’t covered in the book."

• Access to technologies that professional scientists use• Collaborative learning• Articulation of learning

Inquiry unit: How are various cetaceans related?

• Analyze the evolutionary history of a group of organisms (whales, porpoises, …) through protein (myoglobin) sequence analysis

• Show their evolutionary relationship using phylogenic trees• Present results in a poster session

Rooted/unrooted trees

Cetacean relatedness

Presentation

Challenges & Opportunities

• Challenge: Information that is abundant, complex, rapidly changing

• Opportunity:– access to resources for inquiry– chance to learn how to cope with complexity– students part of a larger community of inquiry– eliding distinctions between

• practice/research• student/teacher• learner/researcher• learning/research

Conclusion

• We construct our ideas of what is connected to what• How do each of us acquire the beliefs & values that shape what

we see as just, desirable, and feasible?• School and society are intimately related• Access to information is necessary for

– the growth of knowledge– for learning– but even more so for building a just and open society