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Innovative curriculum introduces Web 2.0 technology to botany education
Summer BotCamp begins in July
June 18, 2008 — An innovative curriculum designed to recruit, educate and retain nontraditional students in the study of botanical science has been created at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The curriculum weaves together four key themes – botany, environmental conservation, the use of social technologies and metadata literacy.
The SILS/Metadata Research Center at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG), the UNC Herbarium, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and UNC Information Technology Services have created BOT 2.0 (Botany through Web 2.0, the Memex and Social Learning). BOT 2.0 is a two year project funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation and it is led by Dr. Jane Greenberg, Francis Carroll McColl term professor and director of the Metadata Research Center at SILS and Dr. Alan Weakley, curator of the UNC Herbarium, a department of the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
Education in botany, the scientific study of plant life, traditionally focuses on lectures and exams, forcing students to memorize complex descriptive terminologies and taxonomies. “This conventional approach is at odds with knowledge about how people learn science,” says Greenberg. “Researchers have demonstrated that students learn more effectively when they are actively engaged in the learning process and self evaluation. BOT 2.0 applies this active learning approach using Web 2.0 social computing technologies, such as Facebook, MySpace, blogs, cell phones, etc., to increase student engagement in botanical science and to address known recruitment and retention challenges.”
“BOT 2.0’s technology is conceptually modeled on a memex, a memory augmentation framework that allows students to share and re-find digital information through the application of structured metadata and collaborative tagging,” said Micahel Shoffner, the project’s technology architect from RENCI/ITS. (Metadata, as defined by TechTerms.com, “describes other data. It provides information about a certain item's content. For example, an image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, when the image was created and other data. A text document's metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document. Metadata is frequently used on Web pages to help describe the content, allowing search engines to locate information when requested.” Tags are descriptions in the code used to create Web pages.)
To introduce the program, the team has organized a summer camp, called BotCamp, for selected students with nontraditional backgrounds. BotCamp will kick off in July with 17 students from Alamance Community College, North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University and UNC at Chapel Hill.
“Our team is very excited about BotCamp, an invitational summer program that includes outings to the UNC Arboretum, the Herbarium and other natural surroundings with botanical experts, as well as information management and technology sessions at SILS,” Greenberg said. “We want to empower students, not only by using technology, but by enhancing their knowledge of botany and by teaching them about the power of metadata and tagging as they build a collective memex.”
“Web 2.0 technology offers an innovative and exciting opportunity to engage students in botany, throughout the State of North Carolina and beyond,” Weakley said.
Evelyn Daniel, a SILS professor and project principal, commented that “a long standing goal of the collaboration between botany and information science, over the last six years, has been to use information technology to link students with the natural world. Bot2.0 allows us to extend our efforts to undergraduates.”
Interested students and those from other colleges or universities who would like to participate in BotCamp 2009 should contact Dr. Greenberg by calling 919.962.8066 or by sending e-mail to: janeg@email.unc.edu
For more information about BOT 2.0, please access the Metadata Research Center Web site.