 Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Alan Lysnes. I'm from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. If you study your program, you'll note that this is supposed to be Sarah Kern speaking, and since about two-thirds of you know Sarah, I'm sure you will agree that I am no Sarah Kern. She couldn't be with us today. So Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Portland, Maine, the education group there is focused on making contributions to cultivating a scientifically literate public in Maine, while also understanding the extent to which the things we learn there might be in service to people in other states and people in other countries. And the way we approach that is by enabling authentic science experiences for middle school students, and in Maine that means kids who are in grades five, six, seven, and eight. So today I want to talk a little bit about what it's like to be out in the field with this kind of science and describe a program called Vital Science. Vital Science is a community of practice that involves students, teachers, scientists, citizen scientists, resource managers, and members of the interested public. Why all those people? Why this community of practice? Well, because learning is a great social activity, because kids really crave being heard by adults, particularly middle school kids. And because it's one of the things the research is telling us is that if we hope for kids to be interested in science and technology and engineering and mathematics, that's way more apt to happen when, as eighth graders, they can understand themselves in careers like that. So that's why we focus on middle schoolers. Here's the Vital Science website. Basically, when you go to the website, three things happen and they can happen in this particular order, or they don't need to. Students choose a mission. And with the mission, they're going to identify either a question or multiple questions, and then they're going to do some research. They're going to collect some data that will inform their question. And then they're going to publish what they found and they're going to share what they found with other people. And one parenthetical comment that I sometimes forget but don't want to today. This platform is enabled by the Main Learning Technology Initiative, which has placed a MacBook computer in the hands of every single seventh and eighth grader in Maine, every single middle school teacher, every single high school teacher, and to this point 45% of the high school kids in Maine. Picture these middle schoolers. They have this great laptop computer, and it's kind of like you will pry my cold dead hands off my laptop when I get to high school. So in this brutal financial climate, we're actually managing to outfit kids with one-to-one computers. And Jim or I would have a really hard time realizing this program were it not for that infrastructure. If you're interested in how well that works, Jeff Mao is here and Jeff runs the MLTI in Maine. So let's take an example of how students would approach a vital science mission. We call this a close call in Dedum. These are really the kids, and this is really the stream that they were studying. There's an invasive species in Maine, and by the way, why invasive species? Why would we have kids with vital science out looking for invasive species? Well, because they're kind of exciting. They're generally really creepy and slimy, and kids in seventh and eighth grade often like things like that. Also, there's a compelling community need for us to know where these invasives are, where they're coming from, where they're moving to that could never be met with public dollars. So that's why we're looking for invasives. So these students in little town in Maine called Dedum heard about something called Didimo, but what they loved about it is its scientific nickname is Rocksnot. And kids really love getting to say Rocksnot in science class. So they said, well, tell you what, maybe we ought to figure out if there's any Rocksnot in this stream. So they set out to do that. And interestingly, they found something that was a lot like Rocksnot. And here's some examples of evidence from Team Aquinox. It had the right texture. It felt like wet wool. Well, that is what Dedimo feels like. The color matched characteristics of the pictures of online Rocksnot. It was brownish-yellowish. Pardon me if I go too far here. We found it in a fast-moving stream in the middle of the woods, and that is where it is most typically found. So far, this is pretty interesting. Now, we haven't found any Dedimo in Maine yet. We hope we don't. But this is an interesting alarm. So here's where the community of practice comes in. This guy named Paul Gregory, and he's an invasive species scientist with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. The only reason, or one of the reasons that this program works is that there are just over 40 of these people who are really excited to hear from kids about what they're finding when they're out in the woods and forests and near the ocean. And he's one of those people because he's tracking invasive species in Maine. So each one of these species experts might be responsible for one, two, or three species, and one of Paul's species is Dedimo. So as soon as there was a positive finding, a potentially positive finding on the Vital Signs website, Paul automatically gets an email and I won't read this to you, but what he's saying is, hmm, that's kind of scary. Can you send me a sample? And he explains how you would do that. You would put it in a plastic bag and you would put a wet paper towel with it, and you wouldn't send it on a Friday because it would just sit in the mailbox all weekend. And then he responds. And the great news, the big relief is it was a member of the Dedimo family, but it wasn't actually Dedimo. So what have we learned from this exercise? One, that there wasn't any Dedimo in the stream. And two, that the work that these kids did turned out to be important. And they were reinforced because they heard back from an adult that it was important that they look. Second thing I want to talk about is changing teaching practice. We think open educational resources, high quality content, freely available, widely available, is a really great thing, but it's not enough. Where in the business of transforming teacher practice and content alone, or at least in our experience, has not done that. So I'm gonna tell you a story about a teacher. His name is Pat Grant. He's a middle school science teacher. He's been teaching science for over 30 years. So you'd kind of think he knows just how to do it. So in the summer of 2009, he came to his first vital science teacher workshop. So this is pretty interesting. I'll try this. So in the fall, he goes back to his classroom, and he's done a ton of research on invasives. And he's up here at the front of the class, and he's explaining everything that we know about invasives. And he's quizzing the kids on what they've learned. He's talking about the terminology. He's explaining how you use all the tools. And finally, and a very very traditional approach to teaching, finally he lets his kids out into the field and he is utterly traumatized because he thinks he has to control every single movement of all 23 kids. And he goes, man, this is really a bummer. So the following summer, after this experience, he goes out and he does some vital science field work on his own. And in a fit of craziness, when his new kids come in in the fall, he shares his work with them and asks them to critique his work. What's good about it? What's bad about it? What would be interesting ideas to know if you were going to do this? And he didn't teach them much of anything this time because he found the value to be out in the field, so he sent them out in the field to collect information. And that worked way better than that first traumatic year. So the third year, he took yet another step. All he did was frame the context of why it was important for young people to be out exploring to make these discoveries. He kind of told them where the on-off switch was for the tools and they basically could figure that out anyway. And then he just turned them loose to make individualist observations. And what he reported back to us was man, that worked really really well. That worked so well that I have changed my practice, not just in this biology stuff I teach, but in astronomy and everything else. It really makes sense to let kids be in charge of their learning and let me just understand what they know or don't know. So that brings me to the extraordinary opportunity. That was the subtitle of this talk. And the point is, and it kind of builds on what Jeff said this morning when he noted that there's a lot of inertia in public education. That oftentimes works against us, but sometimes it works for us. I'm going to talk mostly about the next generation science standards, but the same could be said for the common core state standards. As you probably all know, we test kids for English language arts and for math. We don't test for science, but the National Research Council has actually done some outstanding work. They've just led the effort and called a bunch of people in to define what they call the framework for next-gen science standards. And they're now actually figuring out those standards. You can read them. I'm not going to read them to you. If I had to pick out just one, it would be that science and engineering require both knowledge and practice. We've been mostly knowledge-centered, and now the experts are telling us rightly that there is this component of practice, and that's where vital sciences come in. So I want to leave you with a couple of challenges. One, how can we take advantage of the network platforms that presently enable OER, but maybe we've tended to think of them as just a content platform to enable more participatory learning environments. And two, what is OER's role in the intentionally disruptive changes to science standards and subsequent assessments that will come about as a result of both the common core and the next-gen science standards. And I want to leave you with this picture of the vital science team. We are very, very proud of what they do every day, and it's been my honor to share with you just for a couple of minutes of their work. Thank you.