Freely Available Community Texts (FACTs) PI: Charles S. Zender University of California at Irvine Department of Earth System Science University of California Irvine, CA 92697-3100 zender@uci.edu Voice: (949) 824-2987 Fax: (949) 824-3256 Pro ject Summary Our goal is to coordinate the development, solicitation, standardization, and dissemination of Freely Available Community Texts (FACTs) suitable for education and teaching in the Earth system sciences. Each FACT is a living monograph available via the World Wide Web to students and scientists anywhere to study, modify, and improve. The license ensures authors retain recognition, copyright, and review priveleges over modifications to their original material. The pro ject contains three existing, pilot FACTs designed to educate students about radiative forcing, aerosols, and particle size distributions. We envision contributions of new material and FACTs from students and faculty within our department, but, more significantly, from the international geosciences community. Note: Despite appearances, the FACTs pro ject has not been funded. FACTs material posted here is a result of my decision to scale back the pro ject but to proceed with it anyway. CONTENTS ii Contents 1 Introduction 2 Freely Available Community Texts 2.1 Vision Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Prototypes and Curricular Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Scientific Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Existing Free Community Geosciences Educational Material 2.6 Entraining Students and Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 FACTs Pro ject Organization and Communication . . . . . . 2.8 Pro ject Work Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.9 Pro ject Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.10 Significance to Professional Goals and Responsibilities . . . . 2.11 Prior Education, Outreach, and Service Accomplishments . . 3 References 1 1 1 1 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Intro duction The first portion of this proposal describes a pro ject to coordinate development and dissemination of a series of freely available educational geoscience monographs over the World Wide Web. Each monograph will be written, reviewed and maintained by talented students and educators with research interests in that field. We argue that this pro ject will become a high-quality resource for geoscience education because, being free, it will enlist talents and contributions from the worldwide community of interested students and educators. 2 2.1 Freely Available Community Texts Vision Statement The amount of information a geoscientist must master continuously increases as journals and data archives proliferate and grow. Educators in the geosciences must ingest even more information in order to remain current in their teaching and research careers. Comprehensive textbooks become out of date soon after printing, and narrow, specialists texts are exorbitantly priced. Buying more textbooks to keep up with this information glut is a short term solution that only relatively priveleged students and researchers can afford. A better solution is to harness the networking power of the World Wide Web to coordinate the distributed development, maintainance, and distribution of "living texts" in the geosciences. The educational component of this proposal is to found a pro ject to organize the creation of Freely Available Community Texts (FACTs) suitable for education and teaching in Earth System Sciences. The FACT pro ject is not an idealistic pipe dream, as shown by the rapid growth of freely distributed and community maintained software known as Free Software or Open Source software [Raymond , 1999]. Adopting the successful principles underlying the Free Software movement, FACT authors will retain copyright to their monographs, but will give the academic community the license to modify, extend, and update (possibly portions of ) their texts in perpetuity. It is anticipated that graduate students, postdocs, and researchers will contribute significantly to FACTs from their theses, collections of homework problems, and self-developed course teaching materials. Moreover, all interested geoscientists with access to the Internet, regardless of nationality or income, can benefit from and contribute to the high-quality FACTs. 2.2 Mission The FACT pro ject is intended to standardize and disseminate our fundamental knowledge of Earth System Sciences in a flexible, adaptive, distributed framework which can evolve to fit the changing needs and technology of the geosciences community. FACTs will be created, reviewed, and continuously maintained and updated by members of the international academic community communicating with eachother through a well-organized pro ject website. Each FACT will describe a specific sub ject area of the Earth system in detail, using a consistent nomenclature and style common to the series. For example, the FACTs I write (see § 2.3) are integrated with my research and teaching interests in climate and radiative forcing 2 FREELY AVAILABLE COMMUNITY TEXTS 2 (and thus with my Department's research mission). The primary author or maintainer of the FACT is responsible for reviewing and approving changes and updates. FACTs are intended to cover fundamental and well-established principles of a given discipline, not to replace or be an alternative for tradiational, peer-reviewed scientific journals. Thus FACTs will not include speculative or unpublished theories. FACTs should start with the first priniciples of a given field. The continual improvement of FACTs over time will result in texts that are more current and up-to-date with recent advances in the field every year. The long term (5­10 year) goal is to build high quality state of the art monographs which are indispensable to researchers as well as students. To preserve the freedom of the community to modify the FACTs, and the rights of the authors to control their intellectual property, FACTs will be distributed under a license called the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) (http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/copyleft/ fdl.html). The FDL ensures authors retain recognition, copyright, and review priveleges over modifications to their original material. Once an author applies the FDL license, the FACT and all derived works of it are forever freely available to all under the same terms. This perpetuity ensures that FACTs are always and forever available via the World Wide Web to students and scientists anywhere to study, modify, and improve. 2.3 Prototyp es and Curricular Integration Three prototype FACTs, "Radiative Transfer in the Earth System", "Particle Size Distributions: Theory and Application to Aerosols, Clouds, and Soils", and "Natural Aerosols in the Earth System". have been developed to supplement the texts in my graduate courses ESS 200: "Earth System Climatology and Physics", and ESS 236: "Radiative Processes and Remote Sensing". These prototypes are available from my website at http://dust.ess. uci.edu/facts/rt/rt.pdf, http://dust.ess.uci.edu/facts/psd/psd.pdf, and http: //dust.ess.uci.edu/facts/rt/aer.pdf, respectively. Examination of the Radiative Transfer FACT illustrates some of the promise and pitfalls of FACTs. 1. HTML format is for online browsing and the other formats are for printing (Postscript, PDF, DVI) or modification 2. FACTs can look and be as professional as any textbook 3. The Table of Contents, Reference section, and Index make FACTs easy to search 4. Hyperlinks and cross-references within and among FACTs is possible but has not yet been implemented Examples of welcome contributions which interested students and researchers in the radiative transfer community could make to the radiative transfer FACT include (this task list should be maintained within the FACT itself ) 1. 2. 3. 4. Figures which illustrate the material in the text More homework exercises (see the example on Page 18) Standalone special interest boxes (e.g., "Geometric Devivation of Optical Depth") Text for unfinished sections such as the optical properties on pages 30­31. Each graduate student enrolled in my ESS 236 course will be asked to contribute an item from this to the Radiative Transfer FACT. The students will gain appreciation of the community 2 FREELY AVAILABLE COMMUNITY TEXTS 3 value of distributed collaborative work, and will be credited for the authorship of their contribution in the FACT itself. 2.4 Scientific Quality Two forms of "peer review" will help ensure FACTs remain high quality materials. First, a manuscript's primary author may decline any revisions which do not meet his standards. Of course there is strong social pressure against submitting inferior contributions with one's name attached. On the other hand, FACTs which are particularly well-written and widely used may eventually garner their authors (and their institutions) international recognition for their expertise and pedagogical skills. Second, FACTs are open texts so they are sub ject to continuous suggestions and refinements by new readers. The exposure will help authors identify any mistakes, omissions, or inadvertent plagiarism in the texts. 2.5 Existing Free Community Geosciences Educational Material To our knowledge there are no other pro jects which create and make freely available geoscience texts that are open to community modification. The design of FACTs appears to be truly innovative, which makes foreseeing potential problems or learning from previous mistakes very difficult. We believe that texts which can be modified to fit changing needs of users will be of lasting intellectual value to the geoscience community, and that the community will recognize this and help to make FACTs a success. 2.6 Entraining Students and Educators One of my priorities is to ensure that others contribute new FACTs which broaden the intellectual appeal of the pro ject beyond my own research interests. I will actively solicit colleagues to consider contributing a FACT in their own niche. An informal poll of colleagues in my department and elsewhere showed all were interested on contributing material to this pro ject. Many expressed hope that FACTs might become an integrative exercise for the department, allowing us to share our expertise and painstakingly developed lecture notes with eachother more easily. One promising source of contributors are graduate students. While taking classes and preparing for comprehensive and thesis examinations, graduate students often have more time and motivation to read texts than more accomplished professionals in the field. Graduate students who find problems or gaps with these monographs are likelier to send contributions than others. As discussed in § 2.3 graduate students in my courses will be asked to make a contribution to FACTs. 2.7 FACTs Pro ject Organization and Communication All pro ject bookkeeping and coordination will be performed in the open via mail lists and discussion forums. The FACTs website will initially be based at SourceForge (http: //sourceforge.net), a widely used, pro-bono website for Open Source pro jects. SourceForge hosts my successful netCDF Operator (NCO) pro ject (http://sourceforge.net/ 2 FREELY AVAILABLE COMMUNITY TEXTS 4 projects/nco) (and many much larger pro jects) and provides the essential tools for administering a large, distributed pro ject like FACTs. The website will provide the following for each FACT: electronic forums for user/author discussion, announcement lists to notify users of new contributions, staging areas for contributions under review, download area. 2.8 Pro ject Work Plan During Year 1 the programmer/analyst will concentrate on generating document templates for authoring FACTs, and developing a working community website. PI Zender will integrate the prototype FACTs into his graduate-level course on Radiative Processes and will solicit colleagues to contribute new FACTs. In Years 2 and 3 PI Zender will contribute new FACTs on particle wet and dry deposition processes. The programmer analyst will assist authors contributing FACTs in other areas of Earth Systemm Science, and will investigate the potential of new free document formats such as DocBook and MathML. By Years 4 and 5 the FACT pro ject should be firmly established. The programmer will work to increase hyperlinks and cross-references between existing FACTs. PI Zender will maintain and improve his four FACTs and will solicit new FACTs in areas where there are still large gaps in the Earth System Science curriculum. 2.9 Pro ject Evaluation The success or failure of FACTs should be measured by the number of quality contributions received and the number of people who read them. Assessing the first is relatively straightforward. The number of newly contributed manuscripts and pages of improvements to existing manuscripts can be tabulated annually. As with many websites, we will keep track of the number of visitors and manuscript downloads. We will not be aware of second-generation users, e.g., a student who receives a copy of the documentation (either paper or electronic) from a friend rather than directly from the FACTs website. 2.10 Significance to Professional Goals and Resp onsibilities Because of its international scope and availability to students of all income levels, the FACT pro ject may allow me and other geoscience educators to impact more students, and to a greater depth, than we could possibly hope to before the advent of the Internet. The integration of FACTs with my research interests and teaching responsibilities in the ESS department enhances its likelihood of success. 2.11 Prior Education, Outreach, and Service Accomplishments 1. Development of Widely Distributed Geophysical Software : I write and manage the netCDF Operators (NCO) toolset (NCO works with HDF4, too). NCO is an Open Source software pro ject (http://nco.sourceforge.net) developing free tools to manipulate geophysical datasets. NCO is one of two components of the CCSM Component Model Processing Suite and is used daily by hundreds of geoscientists. 2 FREELY AVAILABLE COMMUNITY TEXTS 5 2. Undergraduate Teaching : I teach ESS 5: "The Atmosphere", an undergraduate survey course with approximately 300 students. All course material is placed on the web (http://eee.uci.edu/03s/42020), and the course includes web-based learning exercises. Students gave an overall grade of "B" to this course. 3. Mentoring of Undergraduates : At the University of Colorado I founded and directed the Astrophysical, Planetary, Atmospheric Sciences Departmental Help Center, a free tutoring center which assisted dozens of undergraduates in the physical sciences every semester. My role included securing funding, tutoring, and managing a group of about 10 paid graduate student tutors. This activity occurred under my direction from 1992­1995, and continued after my departure. Throughout this period I contributed to secondary school teaching by answering calls for to the Math and Science Teachers Hotline (1-800-866-MAST) organized by the University of Northern Colorado. 3 REFERENCES 6 3 References Raymond, E. S., The Cathedral & the Bazaar , O'Reilly Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 1999.