Randall Carl Dunkin

Wednesday's conference was very informative and enjoyable.

I had several thoughts after the conference that I want to share. Regarding the need to have students cite data sources, they must be informed that citations of data sources often speak to the veracity of a researcher's conclusions. This situation serves to illuminate the collaborative nature of science and the need for greater emphasis on ethics during the training of a scientist.

Secondly, I am a Starry Night Enthusiast software user as are my students. One of the features of Starry Night Enthusiast is that it can project what the night sky will look like from various points in the future. It would be fun to have a software program that could project, for instance, crustal plate migration in the future. Does anything like that exist for the NSDL?

Thirdly, I noticed during our conference that the image overlays that delineate political boundaries are absent for the planet Mars. Pointing that out for students might be a good foray into space law and international treaties (such as the Antarctic Treaty of 1959) regarding territorial claims by nations.

Finally, I would enjoy having a more obvious political boundary line when using the political boundary image overlay. It seems to me that the boundary lines are somewhat ambigious at certain points because they are not as clear as I had hoped.

In summary, I know that this tool to which we have been introduced will definitely be an asset to my classroom.

Randall:

Thanks for sharing these thoughts with everyone! I love it when people take something that I've thought about fairly extensively (while I wrote the chapter) and take it another step to make new connections or illuminate points of view that I didn't see.

On the political boundaries, I'm fairly certain that you encountered a resolution issue. The raster data (the texture underlays) resolution is limited by the sensor that collected the data. The vector data (image overlays) resolution is related to resolution of the base map from which it was created. We can discuss this further if you like.

Thanks again smiles,
LuAnn