This post is long and might cause a little discussion...
Bruce Mason (AAPT's Physical Sciences Resource Center Director) and I
are putting together a proposal to the NSF's National Digital Library
Initiative <http://www.nsf.gov/search97cgi/vtopic>. Our proposal would
fit into the AAPT/AIP/APS/AAAS (already funded) effort called Compadre
<http://www.aip.org/education/sps/networking/compadre_info.htm>. The
idea is to create a virtual place where PER practitioners can find
resources and tools to help them with their R & D efforts and PER users
(e.g. teachers, administrators, etc.) can find helpful guidance. The
NSF funding would be for two years. After that it has to be
self-supporting.
So, I am asking for what sort of features you would like to see made
available. I've put a list of possibilities below. What are your
thoughts on them, the viability of the project, and what needs to be
added? (Note that some areas would be open to the public, others would
have to be password protected.)
PER CENTRAL (Community Enhancing Network for Teaching, Research, And
Learning) (you have to have an acronym if you expect to get funded)
Bibliography of physics education research (articles, assessment
instruments, proceedings, dissertations, etc.)
Fully searchable database, output in EndNote format possibly.
"Live" annotations--people could add comments/reviews to a record and
even have archived discussions, like the ePinions site
<http://www.epinions.com/>. External discussions (like the FCI article
series) could be linked into the mix.
When a record points to an available article, there will be a link to
the online version of the article
Online articles would have active links in their reference sections.
(Think how nice it would be to have links in Joe & Lillian's Resource
Letter, for example.)
We might be able to incorporate Reinders Duit's excellent collection.
Links
PER groups & individuals
Lists: PhysLrnr, Phys-L, TAP-L
Sites: FLAG, Galileo, MERLOT, publishers of PER-based books, etc.
Cross links between PER-based curricula (or summaries/examples) and
relevant research (maybe both directions)
Funding sources, current RFPs, etc.
Collections
Dissertations with linked references
PER Conference Archives
attendees, agendas, proceedings
Selected articles (like the Resource Letter), if we can get
permission. Since AAPT is co-PI on the grant , this will probably work.
"Mini" resource letters that each cover a single topic in detail.
(This may not be allowed since NSF isn't looking for content creation.
But volunteers could cite these as publications if we have them peer
reviewed.)
Teacher guides that are also topic related. (But see content creation
comment above.) These would have to be brief and highly practical. For
example, I could put one together on teaching kinematics graphing.
PER-based curricular materials, or at least samples. As already noted,
these should be linked to the relevant research articles and groups.
Data repository for articles, including things like Dick Hake's FCI
collection, etc. These would have to be clearly described if they are
to be useful to others.
Video clips showing "actors" giving clear demonstrations of commonly
held preconceptions along with interviews of real students showing the
same characteristics (thus illustrating both the preconception and how
hard it is to recognize during an interview). Could also show examples
of different curricular/instructional approaches and techniques.
Syllabi and reading lists of PER-oriented graduate courses. Students
in these classes might also produce annotations for the bibliography.
Lists of suggested courses from other departments (statistics, ed
psych, instructional design, etc.)
Assessment instruments and/or links to developers, articles, and
curricular materials that use them.
Spreadsheets and web-based tools for test analysis.
Article preprint repository--Although not many have jumped on the
XArchive preprint idea for PER articles, it strikes me as something
that could as useful to us as it has been to other fields. Maybe
housing an archive of our own would make this fly.
There are two stages to the above effort...(1) Getting the existing
literature, with hundreds--but not thousands--of articles, into the
system. (2) Keeping the system up to date. NSF might be interesting in
funding #1. They'll never go for #2. Grant funding can pay for people
to comb the existing literature, entering records into the database,
and maybe even annotating them. This has to be well done or nobody will
go for what makes stage #2 work--subscriptions. What would you be
willing/able to pay for an annual access code?
This will only work if members of the PER community recognize the
system for what I hope it can be--an extremely valuable resource for
all of us. We would have to count on article authors, on their own,
sharing an abstract and bibliographic record for their article along
with records for their references (that aren't already in the
database.) This doesn't seem like too onerous a task as it would be in
the author's best interest to facilitate easy access to at least the
abstract of their article. We would probably also ask groups or
individuals to be responsible for tracking a particular journal to make
sure no useful articles are missed as new issues appear.
...Now comes the interesting part...
You have probably already guessed that this could be the home of an
electronic Journal of Physics Education Research. (Anybody have a good
acronym?) The rapid growth of our field is also our Achilles Heel. If
we don't have a place where all the newly-hired PER faculty can
publish, there won't be any newly-tenured PER faculty in a few years!
Obviously, the journal would require extremely high quality reviewing.
It would certainly be easier to cross-link articles if we actually had
the files on the site's server (which would be at AAPT). This would be
a huge effort. I've talked with Joe Redish about this a bit. I still
need to converse with Jan Tobochnick and Karl Mamola to see how this
fits together with their publications. AJP and TPT are available
on-line. We'd need to find a way for these three publications to
co-exist without stepping on each others' toes. (In fact, if they are
linked, each would promote the others.) There are lots of things to
consider like cost, library access, even whether there should be
"issues" or not. Joe has convinced me that RevTex is probably the best
way to go--have the authors produce finished copy. (AIP pays $75/page
to have this done.) If people wanted a hard copy, they could print it
out themselves.
So what are your thoughts? This will require the whole community to
make it work. We want a flexible resource ("organic" to use Joe's word)
so we can maximize the benefits. We have to be able to add/modify
features so that it fits our needs. It will take a ton of work to get
it rolling, but the real question is if it will be viable in the long
term. The proposal is due in about a month (of course), so these ideas,
if plausible, need to be hashed out soon. Let me know what you think,
particularly if you can think of reasons this would not work or should
not be done.
Thanks for the feedback.
Bob
________________________________________________________________________
_________________
Robert J. Beichner
Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Physics
North Carolina State University
506D Cox Hall
Raleigh, NC 27695-8202
919-515-7226 http://www.ncsu.edu/per
beichner@ncsu.edu