The National Science Digital Library (www.nsdl.org) contains educational resources on key STEM disciplines. Since 2001 Virginia Tech has been part of groups involved in having computing included among NSDL's Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics areas. First, Virginia Tech ran the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (www.citidel.org) project, assembling over 500,000 items related to computing. Then, Villanova (with PI Lillian Cassel) took over the resulting production service, and now is leading a larger NSDL pathways project: That is, Ensemble received $2.5M NSF funding late in 2008, and involves six universities and many related partners, including the K-12 oriented Computer Science Teachers Association. Virginia Tech will be running Ensemble's distributed portal. Virginia Tech Computer Science Department faculty involved include Ed Fox, Steve Edwards, and Cliff Shaffer.
Virginia Tech based content feeding into Ensemble comes from a Wikipedia-like service focused on mathematics and computing (www.planetmath.org), a wiki about computing algorithms (http://algoviz.cs.vt.edu/AlgovizWiki/), and an advanced automatic grading system for computing code (http://people.cs.vt.edu/~edwards/Web-CAT/Web-CAT-2.html). Locally developed technologies that will be applied, derived from work with CITIDEL and other projects, include a standardized approach to logging use that provides greater detail than is available from web servers, a methodology to index entries according to multiple category systems even though an author only has employed a single category system, software to collect content from a variety of remote sites that allow metadata harvesting, and programs supporting searching, browsing, and recommending.
The fall 2008 course CS6604, Digital Libraries, included student work on a detailed design for the Ensemble portal. We will include new services from Web 2.0 and from the NSDL coordinating team. We will cover all areas related to computing, helping audiences/members to find, create, share, and disseminate computing education materials more efficiently and broadly. In this poster, we will cover the student work from CS6604, and explain the Ensemble project and the emerging portal. We will describe existing and planned collections and services, and show how digital libraries of educational resources can help universities to deal with budget reductions, through sharing and adapting the best materials developed around the nation.
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