Authors

Christopher Smith, University of California, San Diego

Marlene Kayne, The College of New Jersey

Robert Barber, University of Wisconsin - Parkside

Abstract

The plethora of applications and tools, the complexity of the tools, the financial cost, and overhead in administering these tools is beyond the reach of most educators. This Center concept addresses these issues by centralizing the administration of various computational resources that educators may utilize in the classroom by: a) hosting applications on a series of national/regional servers, which the educator and students would access through a web interface; b) establishing a mentor network for applications/tools selection and utilization; c) providing a catalog that organizes applications by type of analytical function(s), discipline, grade level, etc., d) centralizing access and administration of applications and sharing of exercises. In this mode, the administration of the computational resources are transparent to the instructor, hence they can focus on instruction and interaction with the student. The Center would host a series of interdisciplinary instructional modules that utilize a common bioinformatics resource. For example, plant pathology and biochemistry courses would utilize the same SWIS-PROT, GenBANK, PDB, ChlamyDB, FlyBASE, PathoGenes, databases and a variety of applications, BLAST, NetGlyc, TreeGen, etc. Using an instructor’s portal, the instructor would set up a web portal for her/his course. The instructor could create a new module or use/share a module from a library of modules available through the Center. Students would then access the modules through their web browsers. No longer would students be restricted to the classroom/laboratory!