THE IESP GOES WIRELESS: INTEGRATING HIGH SPEED WIRELESS NETWORKING WITH GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION ON REMOTE RESERVATIONS IN SAN DIEGO COUNTY

Founded in 1998, the Indigenous Earth Sciences Project (IESP) of San Diego State University aims to increase the access of local Native American tribal communities to geoscience education and to geoscience information. As tribes encounter earth and environmental science-related issues, it is important to increase 1) on-reservation geoscience expertise, 2) the quality and cultural accessibility of geoscience curricula for Native K-12 students, and 3) geoscience literacy in Native communities at large. We have been actively establishing partnerships with local reservation learning centers and education councils with the goal of building programs for K-12 students and on-reservation field programs for the whole community. Our efforts were recently given an important boost with the establishment of the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) by the San Diego Supercomputing Center and the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, both at UC San Diego. They have installed a 45 Mbps wireless internet backbone extending Internet access and high-speed data transfer capabilities to scientific facilities in remote areas of northern and eastern San Diego County. From this backbone they have also established links into the tribal learning centers of the Pala, Rincon, and La Jolla Indian reservations, providing Internet access in many cases for the first time for these communities. The IESP has established a new collaboration with HPWREN to provide new distance- and distributed-learning programs in geoscience to these communities via HPWREN. It enables us to explore many new possibilities in Native geoscience education, such as simulcast virtual classroom activities, virtual field trips, and other Web-based learning, tailored to serve the needs of each of the connected communities and designed to be used in conjunction with in-person visits and real field trips. We will share our progress and ideas at the meeting, and will be open to suggestions and new possibilities.