Lesson Plan for Week 2

Important

I am at a conference this week. We will not be meeting this week, but there will be asynchronous assignments. We will discuss these when I am back in Week 3.

Objectives

We continue to set the background for this class. Our goals for this week are to:

• Introduce the concept of open and reproducible science to make data and models useful to as many people as possible
• Introduce the concept of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and open data
• Introduce some of the tools that help us accomplish these goals
• Start researching environmental issues and and data

Specific learning goals

• Concepts:
  • Be aware of the problems with closed science
  • Understand the purpose of open science and FAIR principles
  • Be able to link environmental data to specific environmental issues
  • Understand how programming and the tools that we will be using can help with open science
• Skills
  • Practice markdown for note-taking
  • Describe an environmental issue
  • Lean how to craft a learning note
    
• Foundations
  • Have the tools we need ready and know what they do

Materials

Readings

You are very much encouraged to take notes for these readings. I am posting a set of guided questions for each reading that you should consider.

1. Replication Crisis in Science

   Science has problems including the fact that many scientific results cannot be reproduced/ replicated for a variety of reasons.

   • Vox: Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything?
     • After this reading you should understand the problem of the replication crisis
     • Think about the causes of this crisis. Assume that similar problems exist when dealing with environmental research. Why is this a problem for solving global environmental issues?

2. Open Science Open Science is a current movement on making science more transparent, accountable to the public, and more efficient.

   • Center for Open Science: What is open science?
     • After this reading, you should be able to define open science as a process
     • Think about how open science can help avoid issues such as the replication crisis
     • What are the benefits of open science for understanding and solving environmental issues?
     • What is the role of tools in open science?

3. FAIR Data Principles

   One of the main questions we face with environmental data is how to make data useful and usable. What good is data, if it sits on someone’s hard drive (not-findable), or you have no idea on how to read the data (in-accessible). The FAIR movement is trying to do that:

   • FAIR Principles
   • Optional Reading: The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship
     • This is the scientific article that is referenced in the FAIR Principles reading.
   • After these readings you should be able
     • to name and describe the elements of FAIR
     • describe how each component contributes to making science more open, accessible, and transparent
   • Think about which specific groups of people (e.g. stakeholders benefit from this)

Planned Agenda

There are no class-meetings this week. Instead, you will be working asynchronously on a set of assignments relating to the above learning objectives.

Assignments

Will be posted soon