NSF Award
1044161
Standards based extensions to Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are being developed to provide contextualized and educationally relevant access to NSDL resources from any web page at any time; 2) to enable developers of open education resources to create apps that adapt to a user's context; 3) to facilitate collaboration among classmates and friends by making users aware of likely collaborators. The effort is resulting in an advance in online learning by combining and extending technologies that are in place and in use. The browser extension appears as a button in the browser and is available from any web page. The mini-portal includes (a) key terms relevant to the content of the page and the user's educational level, (b) "apps" such as Jmol, Mathlets, and Physlets that can be used to explore topics on the page, and (c) pointers to colleagues and friends who have recently looked at the same page or related topics. Rolling over a term brings up a definition and clicking on a term retrieves relevant NSDL resources.
