MADISON – Internet Scout, a 12-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison online
research project, is unveiling its new national math and science educational project
this month at http://amser.org.
The Applied Math and Science Education Repository – or AMSER – serves up applied
math and science resources in an easy-to-use format. Though specifically created for
teachers and students in the community and technical college sectors, AMSER is free
for anyone to use.
“Community and technical colleges serve about half of our undergraduates nationally
and are a critical component in creating a strong American workforce,” says Edward
Almasy, co-director of Internet Scout. “AMSER aims to support that community with
its collection of educational resources, as well as services that will help users
rapidly incorporate those resources into teaching and learning environments.”
Users can find a wide assortment of materials at AMSER, from large Web sites
focusing on an individual applied science or math topic to Flash animations that
demonstrate specific science or math principles in action. AMSER also offers users a
variety of features that they may recognize from shopping at sites like Amazon,
including rating and commenting on resources and having new resources recommended to
them. Users can also post comments to let others know how they adapted a resource.
“We really encourage users to offer feedback on the resources at AMSER. Letting
other users know whether a resource was useful to them provides a level of authority
that may help teachers make the decision about whether they’d like to use a specific
resource in their classroom with greater confidence,” explains Almasy. “We’re very
committed to serving up applied math and science materials that teachers and
students can put to immediate use.”
Since 1994, Internet Scout has been working with quality online resources, focusing
on developing better tools and services for finding, filtering and presenting online
information and metadata by creating practical Web-based information and software
solutions like AMSER for educators, librarians and researchers. Scout’s free Web
based reports reach over 350,000 readers a week helping guide them to exemplary
online resources.
Open source software packages developed at Scout are used by hundreds of
organizations and individuals around the world to help them organize and showcase
their materials on the Web. AMSER, Scout’s newest project, is funded by the National
Science Foundation and is part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).
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