The GLORIAD Classroom
The need to learn is continuous - and especially in scientific fields constantly in change. The “GLORIAD Classroom” will soon provide scientists, educators and others with a service designed to help them stay abreast of new cyberinfrastructure -- facilities, research, development -- potentially touching their professional activities.
At its heart, the Classroom serves as a large curated information clearinghouse with weekly/daily/hourly update services made accessible via:
- a dynamically generated (from underlying sql database), browser independent web interface;
- email alerts,
- extended search methods.
The Classroom will notify users of new content through a flexible “current awareness” service by which new information added and curated each day is made available to subscribers based on their own specified interest/s. The Classroom disseminates this information via a user-defined, personalized web interface, as well as by email alerts.
The US investigators have created the system and have populated it thus far with descriptions of various cyberinfrastructure facilities. The entire software interface for the automated and targeted dissemination of information (i.e., the current awareness system) also has been created based on the PIs previous work.
As of May 27, 2007, we still have to polish the system and prepare it for a limited test roll-out during the summer of 2007. We intend to make it available broadly in fall of 2007. The system will facilitate subscribers and contributors. GLORIAD’s PIs have used information technologies to better (and continuously) inform communities of relevant information in several other “community building” projects. Managed successfully, this can be a useful service that will result in a dynamic, community-maintained international catalog of:
- science resources;
- educational programs;
- funding opportunities;
- meetings and events; and,
- success stories on the use of technologies and pointers to advanced technology resources (describing, for example, the use of high-speed file transfer utilities or listing of various solutions available for audio and video conferencing).
