DialogPlus: Digital libraries in support of innovative approaches to learning and teaching in geography

DialogPlus is one of four international projects, supported in the US by the NSF International Collaborative Research Program in Digital Libraries, and in the UK by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils. The two primary objectives of the project are to develop: a distributed enabling information infrastructure for the support of learning and teaching in Geography; innovative approaches to teaching and learning, based on this infrastructure. Specifically, the project aims to show how: the undergraduate and postgraduate programs of study in Geography in the consortium universities can be enriched and developed through cross-national collaboration and online delivery; different virtual learning environments can be supported by a common, open and distributed digital library infrastructure; major geospatial resources relevant for the study of the environment and landscape and for the study of human populations in cities and the countryside can be used in student programs of study; important skills in the analysis of spatial information through use of Geographical Information Science and Earth Observation software and functions can be taught on-line and made available in undergraduate programs. The project plans to deliver shared UK/US electronic resources associated with four courses across four topic areas, namely: Human Geography (based on the Census); Geographical Information Science (applied to retailing); Geomorphology (based on river catchments); and Earth Observation (for land cover and land use inference). The project will capitalize on a variety of rich digital resources which have been created by both official agencies and universities and which can be used to enhance student learning, knowledge and skills in each of these topic areas. These electronic resources will be made available through interoperable digital library technology and integrated directly into course units in undergraduate programs supported by Virtual Learning Environments within each institution. A distributed version of the Alexandria geo-referenced digital library, developed at UCSB within the DLI2 and DLI2 programs of the NSF, will be used as the foundation of the technical infrastructure to support the project. A major aim of the project will be to show that several different pedagogic approaches, and a wide variety of data collections and teaching resources, can be supported and shared within this common infrastructure.