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For seventeen years the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium
has strived to place powerful, professional tools into the hands of students
as well as empowering them through active participation in problem posing,
problem solving, peer review, and publication. How will we embrace
new opportunities that exist for collaboration, communication, computation,
modeling, simulation, visualization, and data mining? How will these
new technologies enable us to further the long-term BioQUEST goals
of
broad access, equity, and cross-disciplinary linkages? Clearly, the
technical barriers to accessing rich information, running analyses
on supercomputers,
and communicating broadly are constantly being lowered. How can we
take educational advantage of these opportunities and tools to help
us bridge
the social, intellectual, national, and cultural barriers and connect
more deeply with learners?
Borromean Rings

The Synergy of Collaboration
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Computer & Communication
Science
Behavioral & Organizational
Science
The
User's Domain
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With creativity, we can broaden our vision of how
to utilize emerging technologies (networking, computational power, informatics).
Technology-enabled changes in undergraduate science education need not
merely reflect an emphasis on doing more efficiently what we already
do by creating electronic versions of old material. BioQUEST has tried
to move curriculum development from the consideration of helping us teach
more efficiently to helping students learn more effectively. Now, we
need to think about breaking down the barriers between individual campuses,
classrooms and laboratories; how will linking learners, data, tools,
and analyses transform the student 's learning landscape?
We encourage applicants to join us in developing
white papers on establishing a variety of new agendas for biology education
reform. First, collaboratories have made it possible for investigators
to have access to high-end scientific equipment over vast regions of
spaces and at odd times; how do we build on or transform access to these
tools to suit the needs of educators and students? Or is a distinctly
different kind of collaboratory needed for science education that employs
the electronic notebooks, communication, and sharing potential of other
collaboratories? Second, with the major strides being made to establish
national science, mathematics, engineering, and technology educational
digital libraries, how will we utilize these resources? Third, with the
explosion of applications under the umbrella of computational biology,
we are moving from period of minimal professional software and primarily
toy data sets being available to students to a huge abundance of complex
choices. How will we develop criteria for choosing appropriate software,
hardware, and problem environments to fully serve student scientific
exploration?
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