Our NSF funded project—Creating National Leadership Cohorts to Make Academic Change Happen (NSF 1649318)—represents a strategic partnership between researchers and practitioners in the domain of academic change. The principle investigators from the Making Academic Change Happen team from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology provide familiarity with the literature of practical organizational change and package this into action-oriented workshops and ongoing support for teams funded through the REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) program. The PIs from the Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity at the University of Washington provide expertise in social science research in order to investigate how the the RED teams’ change projects unfold and how the teams develop as members of national leadership cohorts for change in engineering and computer science education. Our poster for ASEE 2018 will focus on what we have learned thus far regarding the dynamics of the researcher/practitioner partnership through the RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) Project.
According to Worrall (2007), good partnerships are “founded on trust, respect, mutual benefit, good communities, and governance structures that allow democratic decision-making, process improvement, and resource sharing.” We have seen these elements emerge through the work of the partnership to create mutual benefits. For example, the researchers have been given an “insider’s” perspective on the practitioners’ approach—their goals, motivations for certain activities, and background information and research. The practitioners’ perspective is useful for the researchers to learn since the practitioners’ familiarity with the organizational change literature has influenced the researchers’ questions and theoretical models. The practitioners’ work with the RED teams has provided insights on the teams, how they are operating, the challenges they face, and aspects of the teams’ work that may not be readily available to the researchers. As a result, the researchers have had increased access to the teams to collect data. The researchers, in turn, have been able to consider how to make their analyses useful and actionable for change-makers, the population that the practitioners are more familiar with.
Insights from the researchers provide both immediate and long-term benefits to programming and increased professional impact. The researchers are trained observers, each of whom brings a unique disciplinary perspective to their observations. The richness, depth, and clarity of their observations adds immeasurably to the quality of practitioners’ interactions with the RED teams. The practitioners, for example, have revised workshop content in response to the researchers’ observations, thus ensuring that the workshop content serves the needs of the RED teams. The practitioners also benefit from the joint effort on dissemination, since they can contribute to a variety of dissemination efforts (journal papers, conference presentations, workshops). We plan to share specific examples of the strategic partnership during the poster session. In doing so, we hope to encourage researchers to seek out partnerships with practitioners in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice in engineering and computer science education.
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A social content delivery network for e‐Science
We are in the midst of a scientific data explosion in which the rate of data growth is rapidly increasing. While large‐scale research projects have developed sophisticated data distribution networks to share their data with researchers globally, there is no such support for the many millions of research projects generating data of interest to much smaller audiences (as exemplified by the long tail scientist). In data‐oriented research, every aspect of the research process is influenced by data access. However, sharing and accessing data efficiently as well as lowering access barriers are difficult. In the absence of dedicated large‐scale storage, many have noted that there is an enormous storage capacity available via connected peers, none more so than the storage resources of many research groups. With widespread usage of the content delivery network model for disseminating web content, we believe a similar model can be applied to distributing, sharing, and accessing long tail research data in an e‐Science context. We describe the vision and architecture of a social content delivery network – a model that leverages the social networks of researchers to automatically share and replicate data on peers' resources based upon shared interests and trust. Using this model, we describe a simulator and investigate how aspects such as user activity, geographic distribution, trust, and replica selection algorithms affect data access and storage performance. From these results, we show that socially informed replication strategies are comparable with more general strategies in terms of availability and outperform them in terms of spatial efficiency. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10236704
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1532-0626
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Background Although anthropogenic climate change poses existential challenges for Indigenous communities in the Arctic, these challenges are not entirely unprecedented. Over many generations, Arctic peoples have developed a wide range of behavioral strategies to navigate environmental change and uncertainty, and these strategies provide a foundation for contemporary adaptation.
Aims In this article, we focus on mixed cash‐subsistence economies and the social networks that underlie them in Alaska. The patterns of food production, labor exchange, and food sharing in subsistence‐oriented communities throughout Alaska are driven by the productivity of keystone households who regularly harvest and share resources within and between communities.
Materials & Methods Building on previous research suggesting the critical importance of these networks to community resilience, we use network analysis to investigate whether patterns in resource transfers between households are associated with subsistence harvest diversity—the diversity of species harvested by a household unit. We use exponential random graph models to describe the structure of a sharing network from Aniak, Alaska, and model the links between harvest productivity, harvest diversity, and household position in this network.
Results Our results indicate that both productivity and diversity are positively associated with network connections, and that productivity alone provides an incomplete model of network structure.
Discussion We suggest that subsistence harvest diversity may play a unique role in supporting adaptive capacity and resilience by maintaining the productivity of keystone households despite changing environments and sustaining social network structures that circulate resources throughout the community. Harvest diversity may also serve as a broad indicator of Indigenous ecological knowledge and a tangible representation of cultural practices, values, and worldviews that underlie subsistence in Alaska.
Conclusion Greater attention to harvest diversity is important for understanding how subsistence networks adapt to environmental change and uncertainty linked to social and ecological dynamics of anthropogenic climate change.
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Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest growing region of international Internet capacity in the world. Content in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasing: Microsoft is bringing two new data centers to South Africa, and Google and Akamai have been installing caches. The demand for content distribution within Sub-Saharan Africa is growing as the number of data centers and caches increase. Strategic placement of local compute, storage and networking is increasingly important in response to demands in local content distribution growth. Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) are resources that play a central role in interconnecting many networks. In addition, their role has been expanding in importance for bringing content closer to end users. For example, as content traffic continues to rise, IXPs are in the foreground of the peering issues between content providers and access networks. IXPs are considered a natural resource to evolve into a SDX, because they offer a physical location where multiple networks meet to exchange traffic and to peer (exchange routes). This paper presents a Software-Defined Exchange as a novel internetworking paradigm to facilitate content distribution. A SDX facilitates sharing of compute, storage and networking resources among multiple independent administrative domains, such as ISPs, CDNs, or NRENs. A survey of the most relevant SDX studies and use cases for a SDX, including content distribution, will be presented. Finally, deployment considerations and projects implementing SDXs will be discussed.more » « less
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International collaboration between collections, aggregators, and researchers within the biodiversity community and beyond is becoming increasingly important in our efforts to support biodiversity, conservation and the life of the planet. The social, technical, logistical and financial aspects of an equitable biodiversity data landscape – from workforce training and mobilization of linked specimen data, to data integration, use and publication – must be considered globally and within the context of a growing biodiversity crisis. In recent years, several initiatives have outlined paths forward that describe how digital versions of natural history specimens can be extended and linked with associated data. In the United States, Webster (2017) presented the “extended specimen”, which was expanded upon by Lendemer et al. (2019) through the work of the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN). At the same time, a “digital specimen” concept was developed by DiSSCo in Europe (Hardisty 2020). Both the extended and digital specimen concepts depict a digital proxy of an analog natural history specimen, whose digital nature provides greater capabilities such as being machine-processable, linkages with associated data, globally accessible information-rich biodiversity data, improved tracking, attribution and annotation, additional opportunities for data use and cross-disciplinary collaborations forming the basis for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) and equitable sharing of benefits worldwide, and innumerable other advantages, with slight variation in how an extended or digital specimen model would be executed. Recognizing the need to align the two closely-related concepts, and to provide a place for open discussion around various topics of the Digital Extended Specimen (DES; the current working name for the joined concepts), we initiated a virtual consultation on the discourse platform hosted by the Alliance for Biodiversity Knowledge through GBIF. This platform provided a forum for threaded discussions around topics related and relevant to the DES. The goals of the consultation align with the goals of the Alliance for Biodiversity Knowledge: expand participation in the process, build support for further collaboration, identify use cases, identify significant challenges and obstacles, and develop a comprehensive roadmap towards achieving the vision for a global specification for data integration. In early 2021, Phase 1 launched with five topics: Making FAIR data for specimens accessible; Extending, enriching and integrating data; Annotating specimens and other data; Data attribution; and Analyzing/mining specimen data for novel applications. This round of full discussion was productive and engaged dozens of contributors, with hundreds of posts and thousands of views. During Phase 1, several deeper, more technical, or additional topics of relevance were identified and formed the foundation for Phase 2 which began in May 2021 with the following topics: Robust access points and data infrastructure alignment; Persistent identifier (PID) scheme(s); Meeting legal/regulatory, ethical and sensitive data obligations; Workforce capacity development and inclusivity; Transactional mechanisms and provenance; and Partnerships to collaborate more effectively. In Phase 2 fruitful progress was made towards solutions to some of these complex functional and technical long-term goals. Simultaneously, our commitment to open participation was reinforced, through increased efforts to involve new voices from allied and complementary fields. Among a wealth of ideas expressed, the community highlighted the need for unambiguous persistent identifiers and a dedicated agent to assign them, support for a fully linked system that includes robust publishing mechanisms, strong support for social structures that build trustworthiness of the system, appropriate attribution of legacy and new work, a system that is inclusive, removed from colonial practices, and supportive of creative use of biodiversity data, building a truly global data infrastructure, balancing open access with legal obligations and ethical responsibilities, and the partnerships necessary for success. These two consultation periods, and the myriad activities surrounding the online discussion, produced a wide variety of perspectives, strategies, and approaches to converging the digital and extended specimen concepts, and progressing plans for the DES -- steps necessary to improve access to research-ready data to advance our understanding of the diversity and distribution of life. Discussions continue and we hope to include your contributions to the DES in future implementation plans.more » « less
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Abstract Practitioners and researchers in geoscience education embrace collaboration applying ICON (Integrated, Coordinated, Open science, and Networked) principles and approaches which have been used to create and share large collections of educational resources, to move forward collective priorities, and to foster peer‐learning among educators. These strategies can also support the advancement of coproduction between geoscientists and diverse communities. For this reason, many authors from the geoscience education community have co‐created three commentaries on the use and future of ICON in geoscience education. We envision that sharing our expertise with ICON practice will be useful to other geoscience communities seeking to strengthen collaboration. Geoscience education brings substantial expertise in social science research and its application to building individual and collective capacity to address earth sustainability and equity issues at local to global scales The geoscience education community has expanded its own ICON capacity through access to and use of shared resources and research findings, enhancing data sharing and publication, and leadership development. We prioritize continued use of ICON principles to develop effective and inclusive communities that increase equity in geoscience education and beyond, support leadership and full participation of systemically non‐dominant groups and enable global discussions and collaborations.
