Intelligent Earth: Diffusion of Geoscience Research and Cyberinfrastructure innovations with authentic data and computational tasks

Abstract:

The biosphere, geosphere, and cybersphere are changing fast, with massive datasets of earth and environmental observations becoming increasingly available and increasingly complex, with an increasing demand by geoscientists to generate shared intelligence and creativity. We are interactively building community research software, open data, and online learning experiences with computational narratives designed to amplify new perspectives, increase curiosity, and digitally communicate new insights about wildfire, hurricanes, landslides, climate change, groundwater and surface water contamination. Such datasets provide opportunities to perform enormous experiments using physical process calculations with deep social implications for the collective and individual actions we take based on future predictions of coupled human and natural systems. Our curriculum connects multiple National Science Foundation supported platforms including HydroLearn as the course portal, Consortium for the Advancement Hydrologic Sciences (CUAHSI) HydroShare as the data repository linked to JupyterHub servers for interactive computing scaling from classroom use on CUAHSI compute, cybertraining workshops on CUAHSI Compute, and provide access for research requiring high performance computing (HPC) on CyberGIS for Water JupyterHub on XSEDE. Authentic tasks are constructed using peer reviewed research data and code to develop case studies that align learning objectives with team activities and individual assessment scaffolded with multidirectional pathways within Bloom’s taxonomy. The learner is introduced to the utility of new techniques in data analytics with tasks applied to wicked earth problems designed to broaden participation and improve accessibility in geoscience, engineering and computing. Code and curriculum is available on Github, and spatiotemporally dynamic environmental datasets on HydroShare for collective access and contributions that create continuously adaptable infrastructure. Intelligent Earth is a dynamic multi-institution teaching experiment that uses water as an inclusive theme to synthesize infrastructure for diffusing science and technology innovations throughout geoscience to benefit society.