World Is Open-- UCLA Summer Digs Blog is Closed--4

Curt Bonk's, The World is Open, begins with an interesting and exciting story about the way in which web can bring science into the lives of many people outside of universities. The example is the UCLA Summer Digs program.

Bonk highlights a number of articles in the UCLA magazine about this project and writes,

"The Summer Digs Project is also a virtual apprenticeship for thousands or perhaps millions of online Web surfers....It is quite plausible that many people stumbling on their blog posts from Chile or Peru a few years, decades, or even centuries from now might become energized by them..." (p. 4)

Whoops.... if you click on the UCLA Summer digs, you get the message "this blog content is no longer available." This is a reminder that the Web content is fragile and that it isn't always reliable and engaging.

It is not clear what happened to this content or why it is no longer available. You can find a blog about a current UCLA archaeological dig in Egypt... but it seems less inspiring than Bonk's description. For one, there is no mechanism to comment or ask questions to the students or faculty. It looks like there are 5 posts over the course of the fall semester. Nice, interesting, but not exactly inspiring.

None of this means that Bonk is not correct that the Web creates the opportunity to bring the scientific discovery process into new places and engage new people. I have described Folding@Home" as an example of this type of work, but the disappearance of this blog and the limitations of its current Web presence reminds us that this type of learning is very much a work in progress and not well understood.

Folding@Home--is this what elearning is all about?

At Stanford University a group of scientists has been involved in an interactive science experiment involving understanding proteins in various diseases.

Now I don't imagine they think of this work as teaching about biology and such, although I don't know. They need a lot of computing power so much of their effort has been to try to harness other's to help them by contributing computer power. This is an example of "distributed computing." Rather than them processing all the data, they have written a program that you can download and let your computer run. When your computer completes its analysis it returns the results to them. What to contribute to this interesting experiment-- download the software here.

If just the chance to "fold a protein" isn't engaging enough, read some of their results, participate in one of their communities, see a map of all the computer/people processing this data across the world. Getting intrigued now? They hope so.

My computer geek son found this work when he was a teen.... I kept finding the computer on all night long and was wondering what was happening. Despite my repeated insistence that he turn the computer off at night, it continued to run over a couple of weeks. Finally, he let on..... he was folding proteins..... he was interested in the distributed computing aspect more than the biology, but still one evening at dinner he described reading the latest results published in recent issues of Science. When some of the software had a problem on some types of computers, he wrote a simple fix to the problem. In the course of this work, he got feedback from other programmers who suggested ways to streamline his computer code. In short, he participated in an interesting learning environment that taught him some science and some computing.

This work seems like an interesting way to build elearning.