Ensemble: enriching communities and collections to support education in computing: poster session
Lillian N Cassel, Edward A. Fox, Frank M. Shipman III, Peter L. Brusilovsky, Weiguo Fax, Dan Garcia, Greg Hislop, Richard K. Furuta, Lois Delcambre, Sridhara Potluri · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2010
Ensemble is a new NSF NSDL Pathways project working to establish a national, distributed digital library for education. Ensemble is building a distributed portal providing access to a broad range of existing educational resources for while preserving the collections and their associated curation processes. CITIDEL and CSTA are two of the major educational resources that are part of this expanding collection. We want to encourage contribution, use, reuse, review and evaluation of educational materials at multiple levels of granularity and we seek to support the full range of education communities including computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information science, information systems and information technology as well as other areas often called computing + or X informatics. The various aspects of the project include: (1) developing a distributed portal, (2) defining appropriate metadata and methods for indexing resources - including using an ontology to describe topics, (3) instrumenting the portal so that we can track use and reuse of resources (so that faculty can easily get metrics analogous to citation counts for the educational resources that they create), (4) integrating social software into the portal, (5) developing mechanisms to handle use of resources at multiple levels of granularity, (6) articulation of the various topics and how they overlap in the various disciplines, (8) user development and dissemination, (9) information finding and collection development, and (10) evaluation. Ensemble provides content, communities, and tools for educators and students. The content consists of freely available education resources stored within Ensemble or at other locations. Ensemble provides federated search, indexing, annotation, reviews, and other services to make these resources accessible, visible, and more useful to the community. Ensemble also provides other sources of information of interest to educators. This content includes information streams such as news, event notices, and blogs. Ensemble communities support interaction among educators via facilities such as discussion forums, posting of working papers, and connections to venues such as Twitter and Facebook. These services support open collaborations such as a CS1 community site and also hosts closed working spaces for groups like the ACM Education Board and the Future of Computing Education Summit working groups. Ensemble tools provide access to more advanced facilities to help instructors and students' access and organize materials relevant to education. An example is Visual Knowledge Builder, which provides a workspace for collecting and organizing education resources. Ensemble also includes an alternate interface accessed via the Ensemble pavilion in Second Life. Ensemble supports the full range of disciplines and also programs that blend with other STEM areas (e.g., X-informatics and Computing + X). Ensemble is funded by the National Science Foundation via the NSDL Pathways program.