The Botanical Research Institute of Texas will develop an interdisciplinary network of scientists and other professionals to explore the use of emergent web-based technologies to facilitate continual exchange of educational techniques, materials, and experiences in ethnobiology. The Research Coordination Network (RCN) will integrate the diverse works of multiple researchers into a coherent set of educational materials to share with other faculty and with students. Initial materials developed by the RCN core participants will be made generally available through a unified portal/database system with open-network, open-access structures, such as wikis. New and existing technologies will be incorporated into the RCN web portal, including an open courseware management system, several established biodiversity and botanical research databases, videos, and adaptation of common devices (such as cell phones) for scientific inquiry. The resulting web resources will serve both as a repository of knowledge and as a developing system that can grow and evolve as the community of users provide new contributions.
The RCN will hold two summit meetings each year, one in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for Economic Botany and the other via video conference. Eight working groups will be assigned tasks related to specific stages of curriculum development, including assessment. These working groups will each meet four times per year. Plans to expand the community of users of the web portal, as well as to expand the core research coordination network include an initial workshop and direct invitations to the members of several professional societies and to science faculty at relevant minority-serving institutions.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in the likelihood that it will catalyze significant improvements in undergraduate biology education, especially in the emerging area of ethnobiology, and in the development of an "open-philosophy" model for the teaching of biology. The broader impact of the project results from the development of an open-access system for widely sharing educational materials in an emerging interdisciplinary area. The curricular materials and the lessons learned will be distributed widely via the professional affiliations of RCN members.
