| "The most beneficial part was that the user group was driving what ended up being on the CD." | |
| Gerry Davis, Guam Department of Agriculture |
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Taking the information that coastal resource managers know about an area's natural resources and communicating that to a targeted audience can sometimes be a challenge. In working to develop an educational CD-ROM on coral reefs, coastal resource managers in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands went to the experts—the students—to find out what should be included.
"All of the islands have a pretty good baseline of information on the status of the reefs and have a general idea of what is necessary for managing them, but we have little community backing of that," says Gerry Davis, chief of the Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources at the Guam Department of Agriculture. "Where everyone is challenged is trying to get that information out in a way that's user friendly."
One of the first steps that managers took when developing the CD, Coral Reefs of the Mariana Islands: An Educational Exploration, was to go to the schools with marine science classes, Davis says.
"We had them reviewing all the types of materials out there that they might use in the classroom," he explains. "We had CDs and videos and textbooks from around the world. We had the kids rate them on which ones were easy to understand, or that they learned a lot from. We came away with a battery of information on the types of textbooks and digital information that are useful in the classrooms."
They also learned that there was important information that was missing specific to their Pacific island chain, which is anchored by Guam in the south and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Island of Farallon de Pajaros to the north. "The Marianas have unique coral reef problems and we needed to address them," Davis says.
With funding from the Coral Reef Initiative, they were able to hire a contractor who developed a "general CD that talked about the Mariana's reefs and how they are formed, what they are made up of, their limitations, and conservation efforts." Davis says they then paired it with the Jean-Michel Cousteau CD, Cities Under the Sea: Coral Reefs, which had been unanimously praised by the students.
Last September, 5,000 copies of the Mariana Island's CD were released, with 10 copies of the CD package being sent to each school's science program. The CDs also were made available to the public.
"The demand has been very good," Davis says. "We don't have enough CDs. The teachers are very pleased and the kids seem to enjoy it. It's being widely used and we're getting quite a few requests for more of them."
He adds, "The most beneficial part was that the user group was driving what ended up being on the CD. The schools had fun looking at the battery of stuff out there and deciding what we should be using. The kids got a broad spectrum of exposure and the teachers ended up with a project they helped create. Hopefully, we'll be able to build on this."
For more information on Coral Reefs of the Mariana Islands: An Educational Exploration, contact Gerry Davis at (671) 735-3979, or gwesdavis@yahoo.com.
