CHRONOS'S EDUCATION & OUTREACH PROGRAM: TEACHING ABOUT GEOLOGIC TIME AND EARTH HISTORY USING RESEARCH DATA AND TOOLS

CHRONOS is a large geoinformatics project funded by the National Science Foundation. Geologic time is the intellectual theme that connects a wide variety of research endeavors in geoscience - missing is the corresponding cyberinfrastructure that allows the resources of all these endeavors to be pooled. CHRONOS's purpose is to transform Earth history research by seamlessly integrating geoscience databases and tools. Our activities are grouped into three initiatives: cyberinfrastructure development, community involvement, and education and outreach.

The goal of CHRONOS's E&O activities is to create an excitement for Earth history and geologic time through the implementation of human-computer interactions. These activities are: develop educational activities for formal and informal education, increase diversity, and collaborate with education groups and museums. E&O activities are coordinated through the E&O External Advisory Board. Our main partner groups are the Paleoportal group at UCMP, the Paleontological Research Institute, and JOI/IODP.

In summer 2006 we started a one-month-long summer internship program for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Students work on a science project of their choice alone or in teams of two under the supervision of a CHRONOS scientist and their advisor. During the internship the students are exposed to state-of-the-art information technology and work with the CHRONOS developers at searches, data entry, visualizations, or tool development.

In June 2006 we also organized, in collaboration with the Science Education Resource Center, the 9th CHRONOS workshop for the development of a package of web-based activities to teach about stratigraphy and geologic time using the data and tools accessible through CHRONOS. The biggest challenge for the scientists and educators developing these teaching activities was the adaptation of the large amounts of research-grade data and specialized tools for use in learning activities. The workshop has resulted in an initial core of four online activities for undergraduate students that will be class-tested in the fall and that can be accessed from the SERC (serc.carleton.edu) and CHRONOS (www.chronos.org) web sites.