With 14 Centers and a National COSEE Office located throughout the United States, each Center is a consortium of one or more ocean science research institutions, informal science education organizations, and formal education entities. The COSEE program is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Network National COSEE Office (NCO) was established to facilitate meetings, oversee the Network web presence and coordinate the National Advisory Council. In addition, the NCO provides support and guidance to individual Centers. Our mission - to spark and nurture collaborations among research scientists and educators to advance ocean discovery and make known the vital role of the ocean in our lives - reflects a three-fold partnership between COSEE centers, formal and informal education institutes, and ocean scientists.
COSEE Ocean System's mission is to support the COSEE Network by developing flexible and transferrable tools and processes to effectively bring ocean sciences research to broad audiences. We engage teachers, ocean scientists, and informal educators in a broad range of programs, including conference presentations and regional collaborations, webinar presentations, and workshops.
Hydrothermal vents are one of the most spectacular features on the seafloor. They form in places where there is volcanic activity, such as along the Mid-Ocean Ridge. Water seeps through cracks in the seafloor and is heated by molten rock deep below the ocean crust to as high as 400°C. The hot fluid rises to the surface and gushes out of the vent openings. This hydrothermal fluid carries with it dissolved metals and other chemicals from deep beneath the ocean floor. Ecosystems have been found thriving at these vents, relying on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis.
Academic scientists have a number of avenues through which they can participate in education and outreach (E/O) programs to address the mandate for broader impacts. During this presentation, the authors presented one scientist’s perspective on the advantages and limitations of different modes of E/O and included specific examples from the past three years of working with COSEE-Ocean Systems.
In many educator professional development workshops, scientists present content in a slideshow-type format and field questions afterwards. Drawbacks of this approach include: inability to begin the lecture with content that is responsive to audience needs; lack of flexible access to specific material within the linear presentation; and “Q&A” sessions are not easily scalable to broader audiences. Often this type of traditional interaction provides little direct benefit to the scientists.
The Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence - Ocean Systems (COSEE-OS) applies the technique of concept mapping with demonstrated effectiveness in helping scientists and educators “get on the same page” (deCharon et al., 2009). A key aspect is scientist professional development geared towards improving face-to-face and online communication with non-scientists. COSEE-OS promotes scientist-educator collaboration, tests the application of scientist-educator maps in new contexts through webinars, and is piloting the expansion of maps as long-lived resources for the broader community.
Discover a powerful visual tool to help your students and audiences– no matter where they live - improve their understanding of ocean and climate interactions. COSEE-OS has developed a suite of interactive multimedia tools that illustrate clear connections among and within the ocean, earth, and solar systems.
Last March, Amy Holt Cline of COSEE-OS and UNH, along with Perrin Chick of the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, NH and Author/Illustrator Karen Romano Young, presented the connections between art and ocean science using COSEE-OS online tools. This presentation included background on why art and science are naturally connected and should be taught together to help create more innovative and creative thinkers.
Before the presentation, questions were sent to the National Marine Education List Serve, called Scuttlebutt, to find out what ways educators have been using art to teach marine science topics in their classrooms or work places. Over fifty responses were collected and were assembled into a concept map. The map is interactive in that a description of the text is found when the cursor rolls over each circle to learn more.
In response to interest from graduate students and research faculty, COSEE-OS has adapted its “scientist-educator collaborative” workshop model to focus on graduate student professional development, and on opening new lines of communication between faculty and graduate students.
The Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) is a national network with the collective mission to engage scientists and educators and transform ocean science education. The network is comprised of twelve centers that are either regional or thematci in focus. As a thematic center, COSEE Ocean Sytems has worked to create and develop a suite of interactive tools that can be used to enhance ocean and climate literacy by emphasizing the connections between the ocean and the Earth's climate system.
In two linked applications - The Ocean Climate Interactive (OCI) and the Concept Map Builder (CMB) - concept mapping is used as a foundation for learners to make connections between fundamental concepts in ocean and climate science. These cost-free online tools have been incrementally developed, tested, and refined through a series of teacher/scientist professional development workshops to maximize their efficacy.
Graduate students often enter marine sciences with disparate backgrounds and experiences. Understanding biological oceanography, because of multiple interactions among organisms and with the environment, can be daunting to new graduate students. We use concept mapping as a tool to allow students to better integrate information and turn it into knowledge by explicitly visualizing ideas.
COSEE-OS creates and evaluates tools and processes that broaden understanding of the ocean’s role in the climate and earth systems. To promote systems thinking, COSEE-OS applies the technique of concept mapping with demonstrated effectiveness in helping scientists and educators “get on the same page”.
Contributed by COSEE-OS staff, this article addresses research and development of concept mapping techniques and related multimedia software by COSEE-OS. These tools, developed over the past three years, help scientists see and graphically display relationships among the concepts in their field, and help them communicate those concepts clearly and logically to educators and other scientists.
Since 2005, COSEE-OS has been creating & testing models of collaboration, particularly with respect to reaching rural and inland audiences, engaging ocean researchers, and creating transferable activities for classroom education. In this presentation, we:
Summarize strides made by COSEE-OS in reaching rural and inland audiences.
Describe how COSEE-OS has increased the capacity of scientists to efficiently translate their research into compelling and relevant content for various audiences by helping them deconstruct knowledge into concepts for construction of concept maps.
Conduct two transferable activities, one from our recent publication "Teaching Physical Concepts in Oceanography: An Inquiry Based Approach" entitled "Effects of Temperature & Salinity on Density & Stratification" and one based on two Science Daily articles illustrating transferability between ocean science content and standard physical science and terrestrial ecological concepts.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" – Chinese Proverb.
Can we teach scientists to "fish" for their audiences from all walks of life, and enjoy the experience so much that they contribute to informal education for a lifetime? Using cutting-edge multimedia tools and a novel workshop model, COSEE-OS is helping scientists better communicate with the public by working with informal science educators.
In the past year, COSEE-OS has run a series of model workshops that bring together teams of researchers and educators in order to synergistically improve communication of complex science topics using concept mapping and web-based tools. On January 29, 2010, at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, a new pilot workshop was launched that challenged scientists and graduate students (as well as a few postdoctoral researchers) to open new lines of communication at the academic level.
Error is a given when trying to communicate the relationships among complicated science concepts. Communication research has identified at least 11 sources of error that the scientist needs to minimize: error due to the sender, encoding, the message, the channel of communication, the receiver, decoding, the audience, the physical environment, the social environment, the political and economic environment, and/or time.
COSEE-OS has developed a professional development model for scientists and online tools to minimize these eleven sources of error (not eliminate them because that is not an achievable goal). Particular attention is paid to minimizing the encoding and decoding sources of error through the use of online concept mapping tools which graphically communicate the scientist's logic of how they think, non-linearly, about the relationships among their various concepts of interest.
Concept maps are a useful educational tool to examine the costs and benefits of injury and regeneration, particularly linking the impacts from individuals and ecosystems. Such maps effectively show these linkages and encourage exploration of the processes that control and connect the immediate effects of injury on individual infauna with larger scale habitat and ecosystem changes. Our goal is to expand on the resources that are currently available to middle, high school, and post secondary educators using the COSEE-OS Concept Linked Integrated Media Builder (CLIMB) to create an interactive concept map of how injury affects marine benthic invertebrates, communities, and ecosystems.
To communicate science effectively there are challenges scientsts should consider when trying to craft audience-appropriate messages. The use of concept maps, people as facilitators, and effective teaching strategies can help scientists communicate effectively.
This study looks at challenges which can occur during message packaging and understanding. Specifically it focuses on the use of concept maps as an effective tool for creating audience appropriate packages. Concept mapping allows both specialists and learners to see connections among related concepts. It shows the big picture, while also allowing one to focus in on details. When a learner makes connections between concepts, her/his understanding of the material deepens.
COSEE-OS regularly runs workshops pairing educators and scientists, teaching them how to use concept mapping to communicate complex ideas in science to their audiences. As part of this process, the scientists and educators are matched into teams based on their understanding of several content areas. The matching process has developed over time to become a quantitative and repeatable process that has been responsible for the creation of successful scientist/educator teams.
Though most of that process is not usually shared with workshop participants, the COSEE team thought it might be information that could be shared with the teachers. To give them a better idea as to our rationale and invite them to better get to know our process, we thought of ways to convey that information in a new way. Instead of writing many emails or posting static content to our webpage, we looked to a blog as a potential tool for giving our workshop a voice.
This fun webpage about microbes that help cows digest their food is part of a larger website called Microbe Zoo. On this page, students can find out how cows have a special type of stomach called a rumen, which is home to billions of microbes which can eat grass and hay. These bacteria, fungi and protists provide nutrients that the cow can digest. Without these microbes, the cow would die.
Tested in University of Maine semester courses and summer workshops, this supplement to Oceanography magazine focuses on educational approaches to help engage students in learning and offers a collection of hands-on/minds-on activities for teaching physical concepts that are fundamental in oceanography.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant # NSF OCE-0707385. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
COSEE-Ocean Systems Central Office School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine Darling Marine Center 193 Clark's Cove Road Walpole, ME 04573
Phone: (207) 563-8176 E-mail: cosee-os
