November Learning: Expanding the Boundaries of Learning

Marie Studer

About Marie Studer
Education and Outreach Director for the Encyclopedia of Life, Cambridge, MA

Marie Studer is the Education and Outreach Director for the Encyclopedia of Life, which she joined in November 2007.  Prior to EOL, she was the Chief Scientist for Earthwatch Institute from 1996 to 2007, responsible for overseeing the research, education and conservation programs and working with high-level NGO and governmental partners.  From 1994 to 1996 she was the Director of Science for the Massachusetts Bays Program, a National Estuary Program of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Office.  She is a founding member of L4SWN (Learning for a Sustainable World Network), an international collaborative dedicated to hands-on education to solve real-world problems.  Marie received a  Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a B.A. in Chemistry from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

Main Session Workshop

Encyclopedia of Life: Collaborating to Build an Electronic Resource About All Life on Earth

The Encyclopedia of Life project is an unprecedented effort to make available information for all species of life on Earth, accessible through one website (www.eol.org). The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) will be a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.  EOL will create ‘one-stop shopping’ for authoritative information, offering the world at large a better understanding of the planet and all its inhabitants. Species pages will include authenticated information about species as well as access to a wealth of other materials, including peer-reviewed articles and access to DNA barcodes, all freely available. It is being assembeled by a growing partnership of individual scientists, international organizations, technology leaders, and prestigious research institutions.  But soon anyone will be able to provide information for consideration, too.

Initiated in May 2007, EOL’s infrastructure now includes placeholder pages for 1 million species, of which 30,000 have been populated with detailed information derived from comprehensive, authoritative compiliations available for some taxonomic groups (e.g., FishBase, AmphibiaWeb). In addition, about two dozen highly developed multimedia pages are presented as examples of what to expect in time throughout the EOL.

In this workshop EOL staff will present the website and encourage dialogue to get participant’s feedback about the site and to generate new ideas of how to make the site most useful for educators and learners interested in life on Earth.