Abstracte-Science promises to increase the pace of science via fast, distributed access to computational resources, analytical tools, and digital libraries. "Big science" fields such as physics and astronomy that collaborate around expensive instrumentation have constructed shared digital libraries to manage their data and documents, while "little science" research areas that gather data through hand-crafted fieldwork continue to manage their data locally. As habitat ecology researchers begin to deploy embedded sensor networks, they are confronting an array of challenges in capturing, organizing, and managing large amounts of data. The scientists and their partners in computer science and engineering make use of common datasets but interpret the data differently. Studies of this field in transition offer insights into the role of digital libraries in e-Science, how data practices evolve as science becomes more instrumented, and how scientists, computer scientists, and engineers collaborate around data. Among the lessons learned are that data on the same variables are gathered by multiple means, that data exist in many states and in many places, and that publication practices often drive data collection practices. Data sharing is embraced in principle but little sharing actually occurs, due to interrelated factors such as lack of demand, lack of standards, and concerns about publication, ownership, data quality, and ethics. We explore the implications of these findings for data policy and digital library architecture. Research reported here is affiliated with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing.

Identity is a complex construct, yet extremely important if we wish to understand the practice of teaching as a profession. In this paper, we examine the ways two middle school teachers talk about their identity and teaching practices and coordinate these self-reports with our own observations of how they implement a new environmental science curriculum. More specifically, we compare the teachers' beliefs about learning, goals for the classroom community and for instruction, and their knowledge of science content, and pedagogy. Furthermore, we discuss teaching dilemmas, which arise for these teachers as their identities and practices intersect and at times conflict. We argue, however, that a focus on practice and outcomes is an important, but limited aspect of what we, as a field, need to consider when attempting to understand the complexities of teaching and learning. Therefore, we continue to expand our understanding of two science classrooms as we examine the teachers' multiple identities in relation to their implementation of a science curriculum. The identity portraits from this study provide a rich and complicated account of the implementation of a science curriculum and illuminate a number of potential obstacles and pitfalls, which may inform the way we as a field reflect on curriculum and professional development.C 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 90: 68 -93, 2006

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In this study, we seek a better understanding of how individuals and their daily interactions shape and reshape social structures that constitute a classroom community. Moreover, we provide insight into how discourse and classroom interactions shape the nature of a learning community, as well as which aspects of the classroom culture may be consequential for learning. The participants in this study include two teachers who are implementing a new environmental science program, Global Learning through Observation to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE), and interacting with 54 children in an urban middle school. Both qualitative and quantitative data are analyzed and presented. To gain a better understanding of the inquiry teaching within classroom communities, we compare and contrast the discourse and interactions of the two teachers during three parallel environmental science lessons. The focus of our analysis includes (1) how the community identifies the object or goal of its activity; and (2) how the rights, rules, and roles for members are established and inhabited in interaction. Quantitative analyses of student pre‐ and posttests suggest greater learning for students in one classroom over the other, providing support for the influence of the classroom community and interactional choices of the teacher on student learning. Implications of the findings from this study are discussed in the context of curricular design, professional development, and educational reform. ? 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 905‐935, 2004.

In this article I detail the conceptual trajectory of a classroom of 2nd-and 3rd-grade students as they reinvent topographical lines to represent height in a map within the constraints of an overhead perspective. In my analysis I pay special attention to the role of social interaction-and in particular the role of the teacher-in the process of knowledge production. First, I demonstrate how the invention of representational forms by individuals occur as part of a larger social process of creating cultural conventions and negotiating a taken-as-shared understanding of these new tools. Second, I show how gesture, as a part of the larger semiotic ecology for meaning making around representations, contributes to creation of understanding. Third, I make some preliminary proposals regarding the process of transforming personal inventions into cultural conventions. The analyses are intended to contribute to our field's growing understanding of young children's activity when inventing representations (i.e., metarepresentational competence), the mechanisms for learning within instructional activities based on the iterative refinement of these representations (i.e., progressive symbolization), and a rejection of the dichotomy between an individual's cognition and her participation within a cultural community.Representation-the act of highlighting aspects of our experience and communicating them to others and ourselves-is one of the fundamental and generative activities that is at the heart of the human experience. Sketches, diagrams, symbols, and so on, are a durable trace of our activity and thought that allow us to abstract, highlight, and coordinate salient aspects of the world around us. In doing so they shape what we and others see and remember about that experience. Though much is known about how students learn how to use various representational forms in