Information About the Meeting Structure

The Program Committee has identified 8 Earth system science content topics for the meeting, called strands, which will serve to focus the efforts of the attendee's of the meeting. The purpose of the strand and program structure described below is to facilitate participants at the meeting working with each other to begin to develop a new course, curriculum, learning activity, or other product (in the broadest sense) using DLESE as it currently is, and to suggest ways of improving DLESE to facilitate future development.

Each attendee will be assigned to one of the strands listed below, which they have expressed interest in when they completed the "Call for Interest" form. Strand participants will be made up of a distribution of teachers, college instructors, curriculum developers, visual tools developers, evaluators, instructional designers, librarians, scientists, software developers. The Committee has also identified strand leaders who will help facilitate organizing their particular strand and moving the efforts of their group forward. It is expected that, during the first session of the meeting, each strand would divide into two substrands with 10-12 members each, depending on their content interest or audience interests. The number of substrands is constrained by the facilities available. Substrand participants will then develop a planning document for the development of their product, using DLESE, their own expertise and resources, and their collective understanding and experience of what is required. The substrand groups will continue to work with each other after the meeting to plan and complete the develop of the product they begin to develop at the meeting.

The strands are:

1. Earth System Science
2. Geology
3. Oceanography
4. Society
5. Global Climate Change
6. Atmospheric Science
7. Environmental Science
8. Space Science

Development of planning document:
Prior to the meeting a listserve will be set up that will include all participants in the strand. The strand leader will facilitate the discussion on the listserve prior to the meeting. The goals are to:

1. facilitate the strand members getting to know each other
2. begin to identify the substrands they might form
3. encourage, as an option, that any resources identified during this period be cataloged in DLESE prior to the meeting and that participants become familiar with the cataloging tool before the meeting (http://www.dlese.org)
4. begin the process of identifying individual strand participants who will lead each substrand
5. by the end of the first session at the meeting the initial identification sections of the Online Strand/Substrand Outcomes form (the second method of facilitating development) will be completed.

Reporting:
The Online Strand/Substrand Outcomes form will be used by each substrand for the planning of the development of the product they have identified. The main part of this online form includes sections:
1. to identify all the resources, whether currently in DLESE or not, that are planned to be used in the development of this new product,
2. to identify the steps needed to be taken during the course of the development of the new product,
3. to map out any of these steps that are completed during the course of the meeting or later, and
4. to map out the plans and assignments for further development of the product once the meeting is over.

The information collected in the Online Strand/Substrand Outcomes form will then be available to the participants in the substrand for future use in the development of the new product. This information will also be summarized in a poster (the third method of facilitating developments) that will be developed and displayed by the strand participants throughout the meeting, on which participants in other strands can comment and provide input.

The last part of the Online Strand/Substrand form is evaluation information for the DLESE Program Center (DPC) for the future development of the DLESE Discovery System and web site and the DLESE Annual Meeting Program Committee on the effectiveness of the meeting in facilitating networking of the DLESE community and the development of new products using DLESE.