HR: 11:20h
AN: ED32A-05 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: 1994-2004 : Ten years of European effort for education in Seismology
AU: * Virieux, J
EM: viri@geoazur.unice.fr
AF: G‚osciences Azur, UNSA, 250, Rue Albert Einstein, Valbonne, 06560 France
AU: Zollo, A
EM: aldo.zollo@na.infn.it
AF: DFS, Unina FedII, Via Cinthia, Naples, 80125 Italy
AU: Lomax, A
EM: alomax@free.fr
AF: AL Scientific Software, 161 All‚e du Micocoulier, Mouans-Sartoux, 06370 France
AU: Berenguer, J
EM: berenguer@unice.fr
AF: G‚osciences Azur, UNSA, 250, Rue Albert Einstein, Valbonne, 06560 France
AU: Laj, C
EM: Carlo.Laj@lsec.cnrs-gif.fr
AF: LSCE CNRS/CEA, Avenue de la Terrasse, Gif-sur-Yvette, 91198 France
AU: Bobbio, A
EM: antob@na.infn.it
AF: INGV-OV, Via Diocleziano, 328, Naples, 80124 Italy
AB: Following trends of the pioneer PEPP project in USA, an European group has investigated since 1994 how to promote physics and earth sciences and, more specifically, how to educate scientifically and socially young generations to environmental hazards. Seismology has been selected as the vehicle for a prototypical ten-years experience of teaching and learning sciences in European high schools accounting for the specificity and differencies of educational systems in each country. This general purpose has required competences and strong interactions of both teachers, researchers and high school students. Over ten years of continuous activities, these people have found that the target was very ambitious and that both high-tech efforts as well as very focused teaching procedures must be set on. Dedicated instruments were developped in two years through interactions between researchers,teachers and students in order to fit both the scientific quality but also pedagogical features and were installed in different parts of Europe. The sequence of Colfiorito Earthquakes in September-October 1997 was the first data collected simultaneously in different European schools. Since then, more thant 50 stations have been deployed over Europe and data have been made available for education purposes. Data from these seismic stations have been used as the back-bone for interactions between students/pupils, teachers and researchers leading to the development of dedicated teaching and learning materials as software tools for data analysis, simple experimentations and so on. The framework for such an European initiative has been provided by Italian and French national funds and put together under the banner of the so-called EDUSEIS projet. This EDUcational SEISmological European Network (http://www.eduseis.org/) has shown that indeed environmental education is possible with its typical feature of long-term efforts. Funding through Europe will certainly increase the cohesion of this experience and will be very welcome. Taking into account the number of schools in Europe where modern communication tools are available and not used during the night, one may foresee that a large number of multi-parametric data acquisition could be installed and operated in schools with a relatively small man-power and hardware resources. Based on the EduSeis experience, an operational team composed by teachers and researchers could deploy in schools 1K prototype systems for continuous monitoring of environmental parameters as soil vibrations, air gas composition, temperature, atmospheric pressure, rainfall ... The expected huge data-flow should be carefully analyzed, handled and processed in order to make it available for educational purposes and for actions aiming at the increasing awareness about environmental problems. One may hope that an international coordination should appear because the required level of interaction is the whole Earth planet on which we all are living.
UR: http://www.eduseis.org
DE: 7299 General or miscellaneous
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0825 Teaching methods
DE: 0830 Teacher training
DE: 0850 Geoscience education research
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting