Through its traveling exhibition program, the Association of Science-Technology Centers worked for many years to advance the culture and practice of hands-on science learning, with support from the National Science Foundation. This article describes workshops, staff exchanges, and apprenticeships that accompanied a number of exhibitions, beginning in 1973. The community website ExhibitFiles, which opened in 2007, served the same purpose, as an archive of community-contrbuted case studies and reviews of science exhibitions.
The Science and Math Informal Learning Education (SMILE) pathway is serving the digital resource management needs of the informal learning community. The science and math inquiry experiences offered by science and technology centers, museums, and out-of-school programs are distinct from those found in formal classrooms. Interactive exhibits, multimedia presentations, virtual environments, hands-on activities, outdoor field guides, engineering challenges, and facilitated programs are just some of the thoughtfully designed resources used by the informal learning community to make science and math concepts come alive. With an organizational framework specifically designed for informal learning resources, the SMILE pathway is empowering educators to locate and explore high-quality education materials across multiple institutions and collections. The SMILE pathway is also expanding the participation of underrepresented groups by creating an easily accessible nexus of online materials, including those specifically added to extend the reach of effective science and math education to all communities. To promote the use of the SMILE pathway and the NSDL further, project staff are creating professional development programs and a robust online community of educators and content experts to showcase best practices tied to digital resources. Finally, to guarantee continued growth and involvement in the SMILE pathway, funding and editorial support is being provided to expansion partners, beyond the founding institutions, to add new digital resources to the NSDL.
Connecting Tennessee to the World Ocean is a three-year capacity building project of the Tennessee Aquarium and its partners, the Hamilton County Department of Education, Calvin Donaldson Environmental Science Academy, and NOAA's National Weather Service. Expanded capacity, in turn, allows the institution to reach a broader audience with a message connecting Tennessee's waterways to the world ocean. Primary project outcomes are increased ocean literacy and expanded ocean stewardship ethics in targeted Aquarium audiences. A series of specific activities focused on ocean literacy and global change make this possible, including expanding Aquarium classroom capacity by 60% to serve more students, expanded videoconferencing opportunities in partnership with NWS, free admission and programming for underrepresented students from across the region, expanded educational opportunities on the Aquarium s website, updated interpretive panels focusing on global change, installation of a NOAA WeatherBug station, a civic engagement series, and professional development for Aquarium educators.
The recent events related to the spread of the influenza virus A (H1N1) have drawn again the attention of science communication experts to old issues, including a couple of issues we deem particularly important: risk communication and the role of scientific journalists in the society of knowledge.
Jcom’s adventure was launched nearly eight years ago, when a group of lecturers and former students of the Master’s degree in Science Communication at SISSA of Trieste, decided to have training joined by the commitment to research on science communication issues.
In a brief text written in 1990, Gilles Deleuze took his friend Michel Foucault’s work as a starting point and spoke of new forces at work in society. The great systems masterfully described by Foucault as being related to “discipline” (family, factory, psychiatric hospital, prison, school), were all going through a crisis. On the other hand, the reforms advocated by ministers throughout the world (labour, welfare, education and health reforms) were nothing but ways to protract their anguish. Deleuze named “control society” the emerging configuration.
The climate change issue has become increasingly present in our society in the last decade and central also to communication studies. In the e-book “Communicating Climate Change: Discourses, Mediations and Perceptions”, edited by Anabela Carvalho, various scholars investigate how climate change challenges communication by looking at three main aspects: the discourses of a variety of social actors on climate change; the reconstruction of those discourses in the media; the citizens’ perceptions, understandings and attitudes in relation to climate change.
Standards and Good Practice guidelines provide explicit criteria for maintaining quality and integrity in science. But research practices are now openly questioned. I defend the idea that the tension between norms and practices in scientific writing must be addressed primarily by the scientific community if quality of the sources in the process of science communication is to be guaranteed. This paper provides evidence that scientific writing and researchers’writing practices do not reflect expected quality criteria. Evidence is based on four complementary analyses of: (i) communication manuals
Within the UNAM (The National Autonomous University of Mexico) there is an institution, the Dirección General de Divulgación de la Ciencia (DGDC) devoted to the popularization of science through different media such as museums, exhibitions, journals, books, radio and TV programs, internet, workshops for children, demos, shows, plays, summer courses and outreach programs. Most of these products and materials are planned, designed and manufactured by a multidisciplinary team of professionals in the DGDC. Some of our most outstanding projects are: the creation and operation of two science museums
In the previous three years, 72 90-second Earth & Sky radio shows have been produced under sponsorship of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The impact of these shows was explored with a posttest-only experimental design comparing a treatment group that listened to nine daily NOAA shows focused on the topic of whales and a control group that listened to nine daily non-NOAA shows about Antarctica. Participants were randomly assigned to groups, which did not differ on the variables of gender, age, ethnicity, education, frequency of hearing Earth & Sky, and interest in hearing
The purpose of the summative evaluation is to two-fold: 1) provide documentation to NSF about the extent to which the project met its goals and objectives, and 2) give the Lab of Ornithology information about how well the Web application and the ecosystem within which it resides is engaging the intended audiences. The main evaluation questions the study needed to answer related to who is participating in YardMap, how much participation affects participants’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviors around birding, gardening, and citizen science.
A true experimental design was used, where
Quest, produced by KQED, is a multimedia initiative designed to raise the profile of STEM issues throughout the Northern California region and activate citizens to discuss and investigate them. Led by KQED, Quest is created and maintained by an active consortium of 16 participating informal science education organizations. Based on the successful Quest model, KQED will build on its prior collaborative work to develop regional partnerships with other public broadcasting stations and community-based organizations around the country, making possible a new and innovative partnership in science media production and informal science education. This grant will support a) a growing collaborative of science centers, museums, research institutes, and community-based organizations for editorial development, education outreach, and content creation; b) the production of at least 10 hours of television, weekly radio science news reports, and a dynamic online website that supports and extends the broadcast material; and c) educational resources and professional development workshops. STEM content will encompass research drawn from the physical sciences, life sciences, and earth sciences. Most of the stories will also incorporate content about the technology and engineering used to support scientific endeavors. The KQED Educational Network (EdNet) will administer the community and educational outreach initiatives, including creating viewer/listener guides, developing and delivering workshops, and providing information built around Quest media. Project collaborators include the Bay Institute, California Academy of Sciences, Chabot Space and Science Center, East Bay Regional Park District, Exploratorium, Girl Scouts, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Hall of Science, Museum of Paleontology, Oakland Zoo, and The Tech Museum of Innovation. In expanding the model to regional hubs, Quest will also involve the Coalition for Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), the Encyclopedia of Life, and an array of peer public broadcasting organizations. This project offers a useful and exciting model for public television and radio stations nationally in building community collaborations that advance informal science education. The detailed and informed ways in which the team works with its community partners via multiple platforms are innovative. This proposal builds on prior work in Northern California to explore additional regional partnerships with other public broadcasting stations and community-based organizations, making possible a unique partnership in science media production and informal science education. This project extends reach by developing up to ten regional "hubs" across the country. Evaluation will be conducted by Rockman et al.