Dear GLOBE PI's and staff, The following two ideas came out of our recent outlining exercise and I would like for the rest of you to comment on them or send me modifications that would capture a wider group consensus. A third issue has been appended that I am seeking your support on as an option for schools who want to or have to travel afield. I will collate your responses and forward a group recommendation to GLOBE HQ along with anonymous survey results. However, please mention specifically if you do not mind me extracting specific opinions and/or attributions to your replies because these comments are often more persuasive than a simple Yea/Nay tally. Please respond by Nov. 14 and maybe we can get on HQ's Wed. meeting agenda. ----------------------- Cheers ----------------- Jim Washburne Department of Hydrology and Water Resources University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 520 621-9944 (Off); 520 621-1422 (FAX) ***** NOTE - Tucson Arizona has a new area code ! ***** I. BASIC SCIENCE ORGANIZATION One thing which still bothers me is the overall organization of topics and my position therein. Basically the old structure is: Atm/Hydrology/Biology. Although I still feel strongly that we need to integrate closely with soils, I am unsure the best way to do this now that there is a Water Chemistry team. One structure that makes more sense to me is something like: - the Land: Soils, Basins, Cover and GPS - the Atmosphere: Air temp, Precip., Ozone, Trace gases - the Hydrosphere: soil moisture, water chemistry - the Biosphere: spiecies ID & biometrics What bothers me most is that students will be confused at the fundumental associations of processes - which should be the very foundation or basic understanding we are trying to provide. I also dislike having GEOLOGY in one of the component names (I like geology - but its not what we are about) Dan Barstow comments: Wow! I like your idea of reorganizing the investigations. It taps into a bigger conceptual vision. I agree with Barbara's suggestion that you call Jim L and discuss it with him. Let us know what he says. From Boris_Berenfeld@TERC.EDU Tue Oct 31 09:50:29 1995 I like it too. Perhaps it makes sense to refer to land cover in both "the Land" and "the Biosphere" Units. Did you consider calling the Land Unit, for the sake of consistency, "The Lithosphere?" My reply: The lithosphere, technically, is the crust of the Earth. The focus here that is not so easily packaged is the Earths surface, the transition that includes soils, land cover (as opposed to specific spiecies), topography and the processes occuring at the landscape scale (as opposed to point scales). I will concede that it might be easier dealing with the four -spheres and treating inter-relationships as activities ... but then we will have done little new - the challenge is in presenting the students with an integrated / interdisciplinary appreciation of their Earth. II. CORE/TOOLBOX ACTIVITY - KEEPING A LAB/FIELD NOTEBOOK Entering data on the internet is fun, but we have not said anything about the more fundumental issue of recording data. I think we need to encourage and give some suggestions for how to keep a laboratory/field notebook. Some possible recommended elements might include: - State your purpose - Plan your format - Names, dates, times, conditions - Diagrams, photos and graphs - Include your calculations - Label columns, units - ID your equipment Barbara Tinker Comments: Would a preliminary activity in Module I on keeping a Lab/Field Notebook be useful across PIs? In that case you could circulate ideas among yourselves (we can add our ideas). Should there be a GLOBE NOTEBOOK STYLE that should be encouraged? III. NON-SCHOOL GLOBE SITES The basic ideas here are how to encourage collaboration with ongoing field projects and reaching a wider, albeit novice, student population while seeking the widest geographic distribution of GLOBE sites. This is particularly important for most of the western US (not to mention the world), where there is a lot of open space between communities. I will put an overview here and also send the proposal outline as a seperate document. Problem: Many schools already take field trips to a wide variety of sites with varying educational and/or environmental attributes/services. Can the GLOBE program tap into these excursions to what can be very special locations and add to the students appreciation/knowledge of that site? I think we should try. Heres how: Implementation: Non-aligned sites, such as environmental interpretation centers or science parks might welcome the opportunity to integrate a few GLOBE measurements into their standard or enhanced student tour. An interpreter with some (probably limited to distance learning video) GLOBE training would be required to put the measurement in context, help the students record their observations and tell them how to access the GLOBE visualization/database web site for follow-up investigations. Shared sites, such as local parks or recreation areas might be adopted as a collaborative research project by multiple schools or a large district. The reason being that any one school would not be able to visit the site often enough to monitor it effectively but together, at least monthly observations could be collected. To avoid turf battles and logically, it makes sense to have a site ID that is shared by several schools. Of course, this situation will have a GLOBE trained teacher supervising.