OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Since this report was issued, there have been several dozen national and international workshops and reports from all branches of science and engineering, research, and education exploring the implications of cyberinfrastructure for their future. Many of these reports are available through the NSF OCI website.[1] There is now wide agreement in most fields that we are at a very exciting time in the history of science as cyberinfrastructure converges with the increased demand for meeting grand challenges through multiscale, multimodal, multisite science.
Of particular relevance to the OER movement are major disciplinary “collaboratories” (instances of a virtual organization) which are becoming functionally complete: through web portals, members of the collaboratory can reach all the colleagues, computational models, data and literature, and instrumentation they need to do their work. As illustrated in Figure 8, the cyberinfrastructure platform relaxes constraints of time and distance (geographic, disciplinary, and institutional distance) enabling people, information, and facilities to be linked and used in all four quadrants of same and different time and place. It can dramatically scale up access and participation. Physical proximity (same time and same place) continues to be important, but is now richly augmented by collaborative work flowing through all four variants of time and place. Similar shared knowledge environments by different names are being created as part of the NSF TeraGrid Project.[2] In this case the collaboratories are called “science gateways” (the gateways into collaboratories). Many of these science gateways are being designed to support both research as well as authentic, participation-based learning at K–12, undergraduate, and graduate levels. The TeraGrid website provides descriptions of about 25 such science gateways.[3] The Nanohub[4] science gateway is a particularly strong example of a site designed to support both frontier research and complementary authentic learning—a dual-use collaboratory. The science gateways provide access not only to open content but also to open scientific instruments and mentored, authentic experience in a community of practice.
Perhaps even more in the spirit of the OER culture is the Open Science Grid[5] (OSG), a globally distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale scientific research, built and operated by a consortium of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations, and software developers. There is also a growing participatory learning component to the OSG. For example, OSG is collaborating with the NSF’s Interactions in Understanding the Universe
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