Dr. Douglas Gordin is a Senior Cognitive Scientist at SRI International. His research program focuses on the design of visualization systems for teaching and learning. Three current projects characterize his work. First, he is working with the GLOBE Program, a large-scale international science education initiative, to develop visualization learning activities and design visualization software. Second, Gordin is helping design a Digital Earth prototype system that will enable virtual tourism of national parks including terrain flyovers and virtual walks. Third, he is developing a year-long environmental science curricula for high school students. Gordin received a Ph.D. in the Learning Science from Northwestern University (1997). Earlier he received degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon (M.S., 1986) and in Computer Science from Columbia University (B.A., 1984). Prior to receiving his doctorate Gordin worked for eight years in research and development at AT Bell Laboratories and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center where he specialized in applied artificial intelligence and education research. For more information on his current work see SRI's Visualizing Global Change WWW site at: http://vgc.sri.com.

Transforming Learning and Travel through the Digital Earth
Initially conceptualized as number crunchers and then as symbol processors, computers . now mediate our understanding by transforming information into visual displays within three dimensional spaces. The Digital Earth is a broad initiative of this sort that aims to provide a new space for information and to provide an integrating context for georeferenced data. This talk sketches the design goals of the digital earth and how they can aid learners and travelers. A survey of challenges and opportunities is recounted by looking at how visualization has been adapted for use by learners and travelers. Current prototype Digital Earths are described with particular focus on the one building developed at SRI International under DARPA-funding. This effort plans to create a new Internet domain, called .geo, that will provide full and distributed access to georeferenced meta-data; develop a WWW-based streaming terrain flyover browser; and create proof of concept education and virtual travel demonstrations.

http://vgc.sri.com.
http://www.tvgeo.com
http://www.geovrml.org