THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GEOSCIENCE STUDENT DATA NETWORK AS A BASIS FOR AN INTEGRATED RESEARCH-CENTERED CURRICULUM

Promoting the use of data in the classroom can pose challenges to instructors and students alike in how to best access, process, and analyze data and subsequently disseminate the results. We present the blueprint for a classroom, laboratory, and field-based curriculum that combines traditional geoscience training with data management, visualization, and web publication, which we call the Geoscience Student Data Network (GSDNet). The GSDNet’s goal is to harness students’ social networking habits to drive data sharing and collaboration and to foster sound data-handling practices that will prepare the next generation of geoscience students for careers in government, environmental consulting, education, and academia. The project design is geared toward training students in state-of-the-art geochemical analysis and GIS techniques, introduce students to geoinformatics sources for data related to the research themes, and encourage interest in the subject through field study and application to real-world problems. A proposed software tool that leverages technology currently being developed for the GeoStrat System would contain a public GeoBook and private Project Space that provide environments where students combine their individual contributions in an online, interactive, and customizable work environment and access to relevant databases such as PetDB and EarthChem via web-services. We suggest that students who participate in integrated traditional and cyberinfrastructure-based learning will be more competitive in the job market by being able to conduct high level undergraduate research using this unique set of scientific skills.