ESIP Data Stewardship Committee Student Fellow Summer Updates

On Wednesday, June 15th, I got an opportunity to attend the Data Science Credentialing Editorial Board meeting at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) headquarter in Washington, D.C., and it was a wonderful opportunity for me to meet the Board members (http://sites.agu.org/leadership/data-science-advisory-group/) in person as well as to learn about the data science/management training/education program that the Board is designing and creating.

In addition to participating in the discussions and contributing to the program activities, the main reason I was invited to attend the meeting was so that I could provide two separate presentations to the Board; the first presentation was focused on the data management training survey project that I had completed last fall with the sponsorship from ESIP, and this was a project that I had also shared through previous ESIP meetings and blogs. Additionally, the second presentation that I gave was based on the summer internship project that I am currently conducting with Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE).

As many of the ESIP community members might already be familiar with, DataONE (https://www.dataone.org/) is a foundation that is established through partnerships with various organizations, and this summer, DataONE has made available five different internship projects, where each of the projects is scheduled to take 9 weeks to complete. These projects cover a wide range of topics from data management training/education, to provenance, and ontology, and the projects represent the different working group effort from DataONE. As a result, the projects are giving the interns valuable opportunities to understand DataONE's communities in greater detail as well as to contribute to DataONE’s overall development (for additional information regarding the different projects, including the project descriptions and intern bios, please visit: https://www.dataone.org/2016_interns).

In my case, the official title for my project is “Developing a Survey Instrument for Evaluation of Teaching Materials”, and my mentors are Amber Budden and Heather Soyka of DataONE, and Viv Hutchison of U.S. Geological Survey. The project is aligned closely with DataONE's Community Engagement and Outreach (CEO) working group (https://www.dataone.org/working_groups/community-engagement-and-outreach), which is a group that is particularly interested in understanding how DataONE can help train and support its community members regarding their data needs, including any necessary interactions with data. To this end, the CEO working group has already created several types of training/education resources for its communities (https://www.dataone.org/education). However, the CEO working group also knows that there are many other organizations that are providing training/education for data management, including ESIP. Subsequently, the CEO working group has learned that it is important not only to create and deliver training/education resources, but also to understand and measure how effective the training/education resources are in order to optimize the resources' impact. As a result, the purpose of the project is to develop a tool that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching/education resources, especially for data management concepts and skill sets. Ultimately, DataONE plans to use this tool for its own evaluation as well as to share this tool with the whole data management community, so that together, the community as a whole could understand further how to improve the overall effectiveness of data management training/education.

I had started the project during the week of May 16th, so at the time of the AGU Board meeting, I was exactly half way through my project. During the presentation, I was able to provide the Board with the background information regarding my project, the research process that I was and will be using to develop the tool, the current status of the tool, as well as the additional steps that I will be taking during the next four weeks of the project. As a result of the meeting, I had written a blog about the meeting, and the blog is available at DataONE's Intern Notebooks site (https://notebooks.dataone.org/education-evaluation/week-5-evaluate-instr…). At the same site, I have also posted the weekly progress on my project (https://notebooks.dataone.org/education-evaluation/). I would like to invite anyone who is interested in my project to please feel welcome to contact me directly or to visit my blogs and provide feedback/leave comments to the blogs.