Yesterday's curriculum meeting

As is the tradition, our group met yesterday to report on our research efforts regarding the new Environmental Information course (SIS 495) to be offered next Spring 2011. It was a productive meeting!

We began with crafting a draft course description (4 sentences or so). Students can start registering for the spring semester next week, so we need to post this description on the SIS website. The class will be a special topics class for the IS&T minor in the School of Information Sciences. We hope that with the success of this course, it will become a fixed course offering.

We looked at other syllabi to generate ideas. Although there appears to be few, if any, classes out there on environmental information, there are closely related topics (environmental informatics, for example).  Mike Frame offers a grad level course on envir. informatics. We're all required to take this course as part of the ScienceLinks2 fellowship. It's offered next fall 2011.  We want to distinguish the class we're building from this course so it's not redundant. A few other courses throughout the campus related to environmental sciences, as well. We are exploring these and looking at their syllabi.

We will submit our course description on Monday of next week.  Prior to then, we will review the draft individually.

Before out meeting next Thursday, the team is collecting ideas for topics to cover in the course. Our Open Wet Ware site stores our ideas as we continue to add them to this wiki. Some topics include: GIS software, metadata, environmental information management systems, visualization, disaster week, communicating data, complex data, etc.

I'm currently working on the literature review, and I will tie it all together by identify recurring elements/themes. As I read articles, I record main ideas, authors, key words on a notecard for each reading. I will lay them all out and arrange them to identify patterns and gaps. My plan is to report my findings at next week's meetings. Elizabeth has done an extensive review of the literature, as well. She typed up her findings in a word document which I have yet to review. I'm thankful for her important contributions!

I am also very thankful for our team.