/[volute]/trunk/projects/edu/edumatters/edumatters.html

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-revision 2409 by marco.merot@gmail.com,
Thu Jan 30 13:35:23 2014 UTC
+revision 2410 by volute@g-vo.org,
Mon Feb  3 16:01:20 2014 UTC
 Line 12
  <meta name="author" content="Marco Molinaro" />
  <meta name="maintainedBy" content="Marco Molinaro" />
  <link href="http://www.ivoa.net/misc/ivoa_a.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
- <!-- Add other styling information here (but this element, if present, mustn't be empty)
+ <style type="text/css">
-   <style type="text/css"></style>
+ .edit {
- -->
+         background-color: red;
+ }
+ </style>
  <link href="./ivoadoc/XMLPrint.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
  <link href="./ivoadoc/ivoa-extras.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
-Line 64
+Line 66
  <h2>Abstract</h2>
  <p>
- The goal of this IVOA Note is to introduce and explain the needs
+ The goal of this IVOA Note is to introduce and explain practices followed
- rising from first attempts in deploying astrophysical resources
+ and requirements found while creating and
- dedicated to educational purposes inside standard VO resources.
+ deploying astrophysical resources
+ dedicated to educational purposes within the standard VO framework.
  Issues, proposed solutions and desirables are here reported to be
  possibly taken into account in future modifications of relevant
  standards.
  </p>
- <p>
- In detail, here is discussed: the curation of educational resources
+ <p>In detail, we discuss: the curation of educational resources inside or
- inside or along with standard registration; the reasons for documents,
+ along with standard registries; use cases and techniques for registering
- tutorials and similar to be registered and searched through registries
+ and locating documents, tutorials and similar within the registries;
- alongside with the means of reaching this goal; an idea for resource
+ dealing with multiple languages.</p>
- language internationalization.
- </p>
- <p>
- VO resources as useful material for astronomy and astrophysics
- education and dissemination has been proved by various international
- projects and direct request for educational data publishing has arised
- from networks of educational telescopes.
- </p>
  <h2> Status of This Document</h2>
  <p id="statusdecl">(updated automatically)</p>
-Line 104
+Line 99
  <h1><a id="Introduction"></a>Introduction</h1>
  <p>
  Advances in technology and communications are creating new and exciting
- opportunities for teachers to bring observational astronomy into their
+ opportunities for teachers to bring astronomy into their
- classrooms. In fact, there is a growing availability of remotely controlled
+ classrooms.  As the VO makes science-grade data publicly available and
+ classroom sets of (suitably) networked PCs are now standard in schools,
+ exciting projects come within reach of common schools.  To realize the
+ possiblities, it is important to disseminate material to help teachers
+ tap into these resources.  These include documented step-by-step
+ tutorials, use cases that explain basic astrophysical research performed
+ using VO tools and resources, and similar exist in various formats and
+ have been translated in different languages.
+ </p>
+ <p>But new opportunities also come on the observational side.
+ There is a growing availability of remotely controlled
  telescopes dedicated to education in many countries world-wide, from the
  Bradford Robotic Telescope on MountTeide, Tenerife (http://www.telescope.org)
  to the radio telescopes of the Radio Physics Lab, IUCAA, Pune
-Line 127
+Line 133
  therefore a natural decision for VO to tackle the problem of publishing
  educational data in VO archives.
  </p>
- <p>
- Alongside with these data collections and service based resources an important
+ <p>Resource registration for both data services and documents is the
- role is played also by tutorials and use cases adopted in astrophysics dissemination.
+ obvious answer to the questions raised by this scenario.  While
- Documented step-by-step tutorials, use cases that explain basic astrophysical
+ technically this seems not a great problem, keeping too technical
- research performed using VO tools and resources, and similar exist in various formats
+ research services out of the the resources devoted to education will
- and have been translated in different lancguages. Providing a way to preserve them
+ require some effort, as will avoiding a contamination of the "research
- and make them easily searchable will be an added value to teachers and researchers
+ VO" with obviously inadequate material.</p>
- involved in education and dissemination, both for astrophysics and the VO.
- </p>
+ <p>The next section will discuss the idea of educational resources curation, then
- <p>
- Resource registration for both data services and documents gives a nice answer to
- the scenario here above described (while efforts for data archiving will rely upon
- interested data centers), but, while technically this seems not a great problem,
- from the point of view of keeping clean the resources devoted to education will
- require some more effort.
- </p>
- <p>
- Next section will discuss the idea of educational resources curation, then
  <a href="#regext">Registering Texts</a> will work out the use cases and needs for
  registration of tutorials and documents. Finally, the idea of introducing language
  internationalization of resources will be discussed.
-Line 154
+Line 151
  <div class="section">
  <h2><a id="curreg">A Curated Registry for Education</a></h2>
  <p>
- From a technical point of view there is no need to add new elements or extensions
+ From a technical point of view the registration of educational services
- to the existing standard for VO Resources (<cite>std:STDREGEXT</cite>) and extensions
+ does not require extensions
- to let astrophysical resources devoted to educational, outreach or amateur targets.
+ to the existing for VOResource standard (<cite>std:VOR</cite>).
- The only real need for investigating changes in what already exists is due to a
+ The only real need for investigating changes to what already exists is due to a
  use case's distinction between resources to be used in teaching and dissemination
  versus all the research driven resources that exist in the VO.
  </p>
-Line 189
+Line 186
  <div class="section">
    <h3><a id="contentlvl">ContentLevel granularity issue</a></h3>
    <p>
-   In <cite>std:STDREGEXT</cite> already exists the <i>ContentLevel</i> element
+   <cite>std:VOR</cite> already has the <i>ContentLevel</i> element
    allowing data publishers to optionally identify their resources as being
-   suitable for one or more of the following audiences:
+   suitable for one or more of the following audiences:</p>
    <ul>
          <li>General</li>
          <li>Elementary Education</li>
-Line 203
+Line 200
          <li>Amateur</li>
          <li>Informal Education</li>
    </ul>
-   This element turns out to be misused by resource publisher probably because
+   <p>This element turns out to be misused by many publishers, presumably because
    it is not really clear what the subtle differences between the available
-   possibilities are. Probably, simplifying the view on this element, e.g.
+   possibilities are; also, requiring a fairly substantial enumeration to
-   restricting to only three:
+   convey "for school use" seems, in retrospect, not likely to promote
+   widespread adoption. We hence propose to simplify the content model
+   to:</p>
    <ul>
          <li>General</li>
          <li>Research</li>
          <li>Amateur</li>
    </ul>
-   possible values may lead to both a better description of their resources
+   <p>We expect this to make publishers to, on average, better describe
-   by data providers and a suitable tagging solution for a first filtering on
+   their resources while still providing
+   a suitable tagging solution for a first filtering on
    differently targeted resources at client level. Of course, the chance to
    add and <i>Educational</i> value option to this shrinked list, or even
    substitute it to the <i>General</i> one, would be a valuable change.
 Line 226
    (or set of values) set for this element (Appendix A details better these
    figures).
    </p>
+   <p>Until the change in VOResource can be effected, the proposed
+   change can work as a "best practice" recommendation, possibly even on
+   registry level, where registries can map University to Research and
+   everything else except Amateur to General.</p>
  </div> <!-- subsection contentlvl -->
  <div class="section">
-Line 233
+Line 237
    <p>
    Even in the case of the simplified <i>ContentLevel</i> tagging system
    a curated registry for educational VO resources will be useful for
-   educators to easily access the wanted data and services. A good example
+   educators let their students work with a registry without having to
-   for this is the educational version of the Aladin sky atlas, that has a
+   worry about confusing material or overwhelming data sizes. A good example
+   for this is the educational version of the Aladin sky atlas that has a
    built in, curated set of resources suitable for educational level
    tutorials.
    </p>
-Line 244
+Line 249
    the IVOA resource registry architecture.
    </p>
    <p>
-   If such a registry were a standard local registry (<cite>std:RI1</cite>)
+   If such a registry were a standard publishing registry
+   (<cite>std:RI1</cite>),
    its resources would be harvested by the full registries: this means
-   that any educational dedicated resource will go into the full VO
+   that any dedicated educational resource would end up in the full VO
-   set of resources, which is what we don't want to happen to keep the
+   set of resources.  For reasons mentioned above, this does not seem
-   <i>professional</i> side robust.
+   desirable.</p>
-   </p>
    <p>
    If it were to be a full registry, it will harvest itself all the existing
    resources, and not all of them will fit or be suitable for the educational
    scope the registry has to be preservde for.
    </p>
    <p>
-   What is needed is a resource (the curated registry) capable of :
+   What is needed is a resource (the curated, in <cite>std:RI1</cite>
+   parlance, local, registry) capable of :
    <ul>
-         <li><i>manually</i> harvesting the existing VO resources
+         <li><i>selectively</i> harvesting the existing VO resources
          (e.g. from a full registry);</li>
          <li>register its own educational resources without being directly
          harvested by full registries (e.g. this could be done using a
-Line 267
+Line 273
    </ul>
    </p>
    <p>
-   The drawing in Fig. 1 exemplifies the above descripted
+   In Fig. 1 wie illustrate this <span class="edit">(XXX NO FIGURE IN
+   SVN, PLUS MAKE THIS A CAPTION XXX)</span>
    scenario. This solution will, again, not touch the existing architecture
    while giving flexibility for the emerging educational resources to
    be curated.
-Line 283
+Line 290
  like tutorials, worked-out use cases, or textbook-like material is at
  least as important.  Within the VO community, there is a large body of
  such material for a wide variety of audiences ranging from pre-school to
- researchers (TODO: cite AIDA, EuroVO, VAO works).</p>
+ researchers <span class="edit">(TODO: cite AIDA, EuroVO, VAO
+ works).</span></p>
  <p>To date, such material has been collected informally by the various
- projects on plain web pages.  It was, in consequence, hard to find it.
+ projects on plain web pages.  It was, in consequence, hard to find, with
- Also, locating editable forms of such texts -- which has been found to
+ knowledge of it often passed on antecdotically.  To remedy this, we
- be necessary fairly regularly -- has been at least difficult; while
+ propose to keep record of such material in the registry.</p>
- representing source-product relationships is in principle in the domain
- of provenance and thus not in scope for the registry, in the case of
- texts the relation is so simple and its representation so useful that we
- propose to include it in a simple registry extension covering text-like
- material, dubbed DocRegExt in the following.</p>
  <p>The VO already has a registry extension for standards, which of
  course are also text-like (<cite>std:STDREGEXT</cite>).  This extension,
-Line 302
+Line 305
  material.  Conversely, it is not concerned with document language (which
  can safely be assumed to be English for standards), and it disregards
  the issue of document formats, which for educational material is
- important.</p>
+ important.  We therefore propose a simple registry extension covering
+ text-like material, dubbed DocRegExt.  In the following, we collect
+ use cases for that extension.</p>
  <div class="section">
  <h3><a id="regext-usecases">Use Cases</a></h3>
-Line 339
+Line 345
  answering the question; in reality, few registries expose this
  information in useable form)</li>
  <li>I've found this VO tutorial somewhere on the net ("on a mirror").  Is it
- the latest version?  If not, where can I find an update?</li>
+ the latest version?  If not, where can I find an update? (Unless the
+ title of the text changed, standard VOResource should suffice)</li>
  </ul>
  </div> <!-- section regext-usecases -->
+ <p>On the use cases of locating editable forms of such texts -- which
+ has been found to be necessary fairly regularly -- we note in passing
+ that representing source-product relationships is in principle in the
+ domain of provenance and thus not in scope for the registry. However, in
+ the case discussed here the relation is so simple and its representation
+ so useful that we propose to include it in a DocRegExt.</p>
+ <p class="edit">Actually write the extension</p>
  </div> <!-- section regext -->
  <div class="section">
-Line 351
+Line 367
  The EURO-VO AIDA project WP5 put some effort also in translating tutorials
  in different languages, meeting the needs for high schools and lower level
  educational degrees when starting dissemination in astrophysics to an
- audience not skilled enough with the english language. It would be an added
+ audience not skilled enough with the English language. It would be an added
  value in this case to be able to register an educational or
- documental resource not only in english (as it is done currently with
+ document resource not only in english (as it is done currently with
  standard VO resources) but also in other national languages.
  </p>
  <p>

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