1998 Year of the Ocean Marine Science, Technology, and Research 



Labs/Infrastructure 



Laboratories and the collection of facilities that comprise the infrastructure of 

 oceanography (e.g., large systems of instrumentation, such as ocean bottom seismometers) are as 

 unique to the field as the research platforms. Again, the diversity of the field has been translated 

 into specific technical strengths at individual laboratories. The U.S. Navy has particular 

 capabilities for acoustic studies, for example, whereas the expertise for developing open ocean 

 buoys resides at only a handful of academic and federal laboratories. The optimal exploitation of 

 these facilities can only be attained through a program of sustained and active partnerships 

 between the institutions. 



Growing national security and other U.S. interests in littoral regions together with an 

 emerging science and technology capability to adequately address this complex environment, 

 offers an opportunity for interagency partnerships to establish a portfolio of coastal natural 

 laboratories. These would be visited regularly to provide baseline data to understand processes, 

 validate models and algorithms, and to test operational products across the various agencies and 

 participating industry. In this way, positive feedback of engineering models to fundamental 

 physics and process studies can be used to shorten product development time as well as 

 fidelity/skill. 



Carefiilly chosen locations for coastal natural laboratories can also serve as ground-truth 

 for remote sensing (acoustic, space, and airborne techniques) and should be co-located with 

 fiducial sites wherever possible. Notably, the world's marine laboratories are the repositories of 

 collections and historical data of critical importance for coastal research. They have facilities to 

 provide access to marine habitats, institutional stability , and a history of working together. An 

 excellent example is provided by the National Association of Marine Laboratories' "LABNET," 

 which will provide on-site access to data from the diverse mosaic of U.S. coastal zone habitats. 



EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION 



Education and The Year-Of-The-Ocean 



A major change in what the ocean sciences community knows about how people learn, 

 especially how people learn science, has occurred in the last two decades. How, what, and why 

 the ocean sciences community teaches science and mathematics, therefore, must be re- 

 conceptualized. The purpose of education is to empower learners to make information 

 meaningful, in contrast to memorizing a multitude of discormected facts. What an individual 

 knows about a topic influences the meaning he or she can extract from new information. 

 Abstract concepts must be put in the context of experiences with which the learner is familiar. 

 Furthermore, learners cannot be given concepts. They must construct concepts for themselves. 

 Instructional strategies, subsequently, need to focus on learning, rather than on teaching, as a 

 means for transmitting information. Moreover, the target audience for science education is all 

 Americans, in contrast to science for the elite. Mathematics educators are calling for 



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