Meeting
On Wednesday Erika, Cause Chris and I had a very good meeting with our contacts in the LiMPETS program whose names are Jessie Altstatt and Julie Bursek. It was a really good and productive meeting. Since they have been working on a number of changes on the program. The changes as far as I can tell have been made to make teaching and learning to do the program a little easier for everyone. They have shorten the species list that we are looking in the tidepools. This was made because about half of the species are not often seen in our area so they were taken out. In regards to making it easier to teach, Jessie and Julie are trying to make multiple tiers in which are more appropriate standards for people of varying qualifications. They are working on this to not only make teaching this either easier or slightly harder for some people but to also have better quality data. There have been multiple groups that want to use the data that is being collected but for many reasons they don’t want to give this data out knowing that people could possibly use it to make big decisions.
Quality control is a big deal since data can be used for many purposes and people often want good quality data for these decisions. For a lot of students that go out on this trip will be the first time that they go out and see the ocean. With this knowledge these students will not be particularly interested on working on science but will want to play in the water or in the sand. This data would most likely not be high in quality so it isn’t right to present it as good data. Julie and Jessie are trying to make different activities that are better for students that just want to play. There will be multiple tiers as I said so there would be more activites for more advance students. This is the main way that Julie and Jessie are trying to increase the quality of the data.
During our time in the meeting we talked about all of this and what they have also been looking at for the changes and if we would be interested in helping them get data sorted and to get more data that will help with the changes. We also went over where we will be looking at the tidepools once we take the kids out and where we will be looking at the sand crabs/ mole crabs. There was very little change being done to the mole crab part of LiMPETS that review went smoothly.
Once we were all done talking we went down to the beach area where we will be taking the kids in February, it should be a very interesting time once it all comes together. I am very excited about it. Hopefully it will all go relatively smoothly.
