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ABSTRACTS
TEACHING NETWORK SCIENCE FOR PUBLIC POLICY TO UNDERGRADUATES AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Chris Arney
United States Military Academy West Point
Establishing new undergraduate curricula can be a challenge. Many issues need to be solved in addition to developing new courses and convincing the administration of the need for and the role of the new program. This is especially challenging when you are possibly the first place trying to build such a program. This is where we are at the United States Military Academy with regard to establishing an undergraduate program in Network Science (NS). In addition to presenting information about this developing academic program, this talk with discuss several recently offered interdisciplinary NS courses. These courses teach students to confront complexity in modeling, solving, analyzing, and understanding large dynamic systems and networks. They are a mix of theory and application, where students are asked to apply network strategies and metrics for models to benefit society. Since evaluating and recommending public policy is a complex social, political, scientific process with many competing issues and challenges, these courses are often team taught and designed for higher level undergraduates. The presenter will also discuss attempts to bring these NS concepts to lower level students (first year undergraduate and high school students).
NETWORKS ACROSS SYSTEMS AND SETTINGS: LESSONS FROM AN INTERNATIONAL SET OF SOCIAL NETWORK STUDIES
Alan J. Daly (University of California, San Diego) & Nienke M. Moolenaar (University of California, San Diego / University of Twente)
Efforts at improving public educational systems in support of better achievement for students are commonplace across the globe. These reform efforts are typically enacted using a variety of formal structures, processes, and accountability levers to improve performance. However, while these more formal, technical approaches at improving education are important and have been well documented, what appears to be missing in the educational change literature, is attention to the relational linkages between actors through which reform flows. Through informal networks of relations between actors in a system, social resources such as knowledge, information, and expertise are exchanged. Change, therefore, does not result solely through technical plans and blueprints, but through the interaction of participants as these change processes emerge and are maintained through interpersonal relationships. It is the interdependence of relational ties that may ultimately moderate, influence, and even determine the direction, speed, and depth of educational change. As such, examining the quality of relationships between and among actors is important in understanding how the flow of resources within a system may support or constrain efforts at change. Therefore in this talk, we will share our recent insights in educational networks that have been informed by our work in schools both in the U.S. and the Netherlands. By discussing the theoretical, methodological, and empirical notions involved in conducting network research in education, we aim to offer an applied international perspective on educational network studies foregrounding the examination of relationships within, among, and between educational actors at multiple levels of the educational system.
MEASURING SUCCESS OF FEDERALLY FUNDED STEM EDUCATION NETWORKS
Catherine Cramer & Stephen Uzzo
New York Hall of Science / COSEE OCEAN
The National Science Foundation has a successful track record of funding networks in support of collaborative research, now common in the 21st century. A similar model has been used to fund STEM education networks such as the Climate Change Education Partnerships (CCEP), Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISENet), and the Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence (COSEE). There is increasing interest in evaluating these networks through a network science lens, both to improve understanding of the effectiveness of network interactions and to examine the value and sustainability of the network itself. Although this is largely unexplored territory, COSEE OCEAN (Ocean Communities in Education And social Networks, one of the 12 NSF funded COSEE centers) has made its explicit goal to use network analysis approaches to help identify indicators of the effectiveness and sustainability of education networks. The investigators will discuss how lessons learned from analyses of less complex networks analogous to COSEE will be applied to analyzing the greater COSEE Network and to developing metrics that can be applied to other complex educational networks, such as NISENet and CCEP.
USING NETLOGO FOR STEM LEARNING THROUGH A COMPLEX SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE
Aditi Wagh, Arthur Hjorth, Uri Wilensky
Northwestern University
What do evolutionary change, traffic jams and electricity have in common? All three can be viewed felicitously through a complex systems perspective: As phenomena, comprising of a number of simple elements that interact with each other and the environment, creating emergent, and often surprising outcomes at the aggregate level.
Agentbased modeling allows us to reproduce and simulate these phenomena by programming agents, environment, and their respective interactions. One of the most widely used agent based modeling tools is NetLogo, developed by Uri Wilensky at the Center for Connected Learning & Computerbased Modeling (CCL) at Northwestern University.
NetLogo supports the construction, analysis and critique of agentbased models. NetLogo is designed on the principle of low threshold, high ceiling, making it accessible to learners as young as elementary students, and yet computationally powerful enough for researchers.
NetLogo comes with a library of models in a variety of disciplines such as chemistry, biology, material sciences, and social sciences.
In this talk, we will present NetLogo and briefly describe some of the projects we've been working on in CCL.
ASSESSING DATA INTERPRETATION SKILLS USING MULTIPLE METHODS
Adam V. Maltese
Indiana University – Bloomington
In the past few years, the importance of data analysis has entered mainstream dialogue in the United States. From an educational perspective, the importance of these skills is reflected by their inclusion in the K12 national standards for both math and science (NCTM, 2000; NRC, 1996; NRC 2012). In this talk I’ll discuss work we are conducting related to how students (undergraduate and graduate) and scientists read and interpret data displays and what they do when asked to create their own displays. By looking at the progression from novice to expert, this research will hopefully uncover some of the stumbling blocks students deal with as they learn to “see” data like experts where instruction in these skills is only sometimes explicit (Goodwin, 1994). Our preliminary findings suggest a moderate level of variation in how novices and experts interpret and graphically represent scientific data. While such outcomes are to be expected, I will argue that without using multiple methods to investigate these skills, interpretation of the results from any single method might lead to different conclusions. We believe the results of this work can refine our understanding of how students develop data literacy skills and inform instructional strategies at secondary and post secondary levels.
BUILDING A BOOLEAN NETWORK MODEL OF ANGIOGENIC TIP AND STALK CELL FORMATION
Erzsébet Ravasz Regan
Harvard Medical School
Formation of new blood vessels, termed angiogenesis, is an essential process in development, wound healing and formation of the placenta during pregnancy. Angiogenesis is initiated by endothelial cells in response to a lack of oxygen and/or inflammation. Growing a new capillary network requires proliferation of endothelial cells, migration, but also formation of tubes with tight junctions between cells. These functions do not coexist in single endothelial cells. Instead, each endothelial cell integrates signals from its own microenvironment, including growth factors, signals from neighboring cells and flow. As a result, cells dynamically switch between one of two, possibly three distinct, complex phenotypes (migratory tip cells, proliferative stalk cells and quiescent phalanx cells). They generate robust phenotype patterns required for healthy capillary network formation. This pattern is perturbed and possibly lost when tumor vessels form.
The regulatory network that selects and alters these phenotypes in angiogenesis is not well understood. We present a Boolean model that integrates known elements of this pattern forming circuit. Our aim is to model the environmentdependence of this circuit, its influence on processes that govern proliferation and quiescence, and to investigate whether these phenotypes feed back onto the pattern generating network.
Most of the information fed into this Boolean model has been assembled by a high school senior, Mary Lindsay. She learned about Boolean modeling, phase spaces, dynamical trajectories and attractor states, the biology of angiogenesis and a bit of computer code. She encountered all these aspects of modeling biological systems mixed together, in an organic fashion. She is vocal about her appreciation for an experience that differs significantly from a
previous internship at the wet bench. She is now considering a theory oriented research career as she moves on to college.
A VENTURE OF HIGHSCHOOL STUDENTS IN NETWORKS RESEARCH
Lazaros Gallos
City College of New York
I will review the experience of mentoring three high school students for 4 months on a complex network project. This guidance was part of a pilot NSF funded project. The students had no former knowledge of the field. Following some general tutorial sessions, the students were involved in deciding the direction the project would take. The resulting research question was the degree to which online interactions are representative of real life friendship. For this, the students interviewed a large sample of their classmates on who they consider to be their friends and who in this sample are their online friends. The results were analyzed through standard network analysis software. The students presented their completed work in a scientific poster, which was selected for presentation at the 2011 NetSci conference. A key point of the project was that the high school students had to go through all the stages of a research agenda, starting from personally collecting the data to analyzing the results and ending up with the derive conclusions. I will discuss the problems that were met in the process of including high school students in academic research, as well as the many benefits for them in conducting an original research study.
INTRODUCING NETWORK SCIENCE TO HIGH SCHOOLS: MERITS, ISSUES, AND TIPS, FROM A PROFESSOR'S PERSPECTIVE
Hiroki Sayama
Binghamton University
It all started from a brief conversation between Dr. Stephen Uzzo and me in the new MIT Media Lab building at NetSci 2010. I feel quite fortunate to play a part in the launching process of the NetSci High program that has developed rapidly over the last two years, which has given me a lot of enriching experience. My role in this program has been a little unusual; while being part of the program organizers, I have also collaborated with a local high school and supervised high school students myself. I worked with two student teams in the first year. One of them continued their project in the second year, which is being presented at NetSci 2012. In my talk, I would like to share some of my experiences that I obtained through this unique program. In particular, I will discuss (1) why network scientists (especially junior faculty) should consider participating in NetSci High, (2) what are typical issues to be expected and overcome, and (3) how to make collaboration with high schools successful and rewarding (all from a university professor's selfish perspective).
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