EKT

Education and Knowledge Transfer (EKT) Working Group

Introduction
CSDMS plans on strong and fully integrated Education and Knowledge Transfer components. CSDMS will focus its knowledge transfer efforts on three CSDMS end-user groups: researchers, planners, and educators. CSDMS will target:

• Researchers with model and visualization tools for the testing of hypotheses in support of data interpretation, and development of field programs. The archiving of benchmark data sets, documented source code, and the ability to download models with user-friendly graphical interfaces are key components of the Center's knowledge transfer objective.
• Planners with decision-making tools to run scenarios, and relate GIS output to environmental factors and land use while quantifying uncertainties.
• Educators with pre-packaged models to help illustrate surface processes, tools to build intuition with “what-if”-type model runs, case studies that integrate field data and model simulations, and prepare exploratory exercises for students. The Web-Data Specialist and EKT Specialist will be expected to work closely together and will be carefully selected to have good popular-science writing skills.

Our principal Education audiences are university students, professionals, teachers at the secondary school and college levels, and the general public. Resources to support this effort will not become available until the third year of the CSDMS effort, due to NSF budget reductions. CSDMS will jump-start our Education and KT activities by coordinating them closely with the EKT programs at the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED), a funded NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to developing a predictive, quantitative understanding of the processes that shape the Earth's Surface.

Chair
Karen Campbell
National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED)
University of Minnesota
23rd Ave SE
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Email: kmc@umn.edu
Phone:+1 612-626-6166

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