Category Archives: Projects

Each year, US researchers spend 4000 person years creating and exhibiting posters at meetings (globally it could well be 10 times this number). Science (and engineering) posters are a window into the state of knowledge and research at hundreds of universities and research laboratories. These posters are designed to highlight the latest achievements… years before these are published. Often displayed for a few hours to several individuals, the posters are generally tossed away (as is their ephemeral fate). The equivalent of centuries of work dumped into landfills without a trace each year. In January 2011, the Federation had a better idea; In the hallway of the Winter 2011 ESIP Federation Meeting, 
a conversation was started on the value of a digital poster service for the ESIP meetings: the initial added value was access—access across the whole Federation, and access across time. The notion of an ESIP Digital Poster Service was born. Within a month, this conversation was expanded to include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Within 3 months the pilot effort was funded to be tested at the 2011 Summer ESIP meeting. Beyond the scope of the Federation, the idea of an academy-wide digital poster commons captures the real value that science/engineering posters bring to the research endeavor. When combined with semantic and geographic services, posters become postcards that science teams send out to the entire academy… seeking for new ideas and potential new collaborations.

TOP 10 Potential Benefits of Skolr

1. Improve the ROI for hundreds of thousands of science posters each year

2. Improve the experience at thousands of science meetings each year

3. Accelerate the pace of science communication

4. Accelerate the rate of science innovation

5. Build a global real-time commons for research in-progress

6. Connect hundreds of third-world scientists to their first-world peers

7. Help thousands of graduate students find research collaborators

8. Build discoverable links between research, data, and null-results

9. Create active links between science domains

10. Build a researchable archive for millions of science posters for decades to come

Here are some next steps:

• Review the pilot test and record lessons learned for the next phase.
• Develop partnerships with other Earth Science meeting organizers (and then, other disciplines) to add more meetings.
• Acquire support for a more robust digital meeting poster service that can accommodate a wide range of meeting requirements.
• Build the poster commons metadata requirements and APIs to the open-source poster service.
• Enlist experts and stakeholders in the conversation about the merits, opportunities, and complexities of this service.

The Skolr project is grateful to the following Funders:

Posted April 24th, 2009  (Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation today announced that the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media at UC Santa Barbara is one of 14 institutions throughout the world to be awarded a prestigious Digital Media and Learning Innovation grant.

Selected from among more than 700 proposals, the winning projects from universities, individuals, and organizations are expected to make pioneering contributions to the emerging field of digital media education. The MacArthur Foundation distributed a total of $2 million to develop novel learning environments using a broad range of digital media tools.

The Digital Media and Learning Competition is part of the foundation’s $50 million initiative designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.

MacArthur president Jonathan Fanton described the winners as “true exemplars of how digital media are transforming the way we think and learn.”

UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center received $211,000 to support a multidisciplinary entrepreneurial ocean science education and social networking initiative. Titled “DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea,” the pilot project will focus on ocean sustainability and engage 200 middle and high school classrooms around the globe in a dynamic online international learning community. Participants will collect and share data, images, and stories about seafood choices in their communities and learn how these choices affect the health of the world’s oceans.

“Sampling the Sea uses multidisciplinary teams of students, scientists, and new media experts, partnering with Google Ocean, NASA GLOBE, and ePals, to engage the next generation of consumers in a global dialogue on the interrelationships among local human customs, regulatory laws, fishing practices, wildlife management, and the future of the sea,” said Constance Penley, project leader and co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center.

The UCSB initiative is important because it uses innovative participatory learning techniques such as online social networking, photo sharing, “mashing-up,” and gaming to bring ocean literacy to classrooms where today it is almost entirely missing.

“With the majority of the world’s fisheries projected to collapse by the middle of the 21st Century, and nearly a third of major fish species already seriously depleted, it is vital that young people collaborate on understanding the implications of how we harvest and consume seafood if we are to create a cultural consensus to address this problem before it is too late,” noted Penley, who is also a professor of film and media studies. “We want to create a fan base for the ocean.”

Additional UCSB researchers participating in the project are Steven Gaines, director of the Marine Science Institute and professor of ecology, evolution, and marine biology; John Melack, acting dean of the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and professor of ecology, evolution, and marine biology; Ronald E. Rice, co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and Arthur N. Rupe professor of communication; Cathy Boggs, associate director of the Carsey-Wolf Center; and Bruce Caron, project manager and executive director of the New Media Research Institute in Santa Barbara.

At the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media, scholars from UCSB’s nationally renowned departments of film and media studies and communication collaborate with researchers drawn from all of the university’s schools and divisions to study everything from silent films to the latest in digital media and satellite communications. It is one of the first centers at a major university where faculty from the arts, humanities, and sciences collaborate to teach and study mass media from a variety of social, cultural, historical, and scientific perspectives.

The Carsey-Wolf Center’s Environmental Media Initiative brings media and communication scholars together with environmental scientists to engage in teaching and research. “Sampling the Sea” is a pilot project of the Environmental Media Initiative’s “DigitalOcean,” an ocean science education and social networking infrastructure project to create international, multigenerational communities working for ocean conservation. Support for the initial development of DigitalOcean was provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

The Digital Media and Learning Competition is funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant to UC Irvine and Duke University. It is administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, a virtual network of learning institutions committed to new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by the creative use of technology.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grant-making institution helping to build a more just and sustainable world. Through the support it provides, the foundation fosters the development of knowledge, nurtures individual creativity, strengthens institutions, helps improve public policy and provides information to the public, primarily through support for public interest media. With assets of more than $6.4 billion, the foundation makes approximately $225 million in grants annually and works in 60 countries.