Twin Cities Public Television in collaboration with a committee of STEM media professionals will organize a one-day conference devoted to network building and planning for an inaugural, multi-day STEM Media Producers Conference in 2013 or 2014. Professional organizations and conferences are well-known and effective means of building community and advancing practice within specific fields. Mass media – film, television, radio, and more recently, productions for online/digital platforms – have been a primary component of NSF’s support for informal science education (ISE) for more than three decades, drawing on the skills of an extremely diverse array of professionals. Yet despite the many common issues faced by these professionals and the increasingly cross-platform nature of ISE media projects in the NSF portfolio, at present no formal organization, professional society or annual conference exists for this community. An organization of media producers and a regular, annual meeting will provide a much-needed forum to address issues of training and professional development, facilitate cross-platform collaborations, increase the use of new media technologies, and synthesize evaluations and research into coherent statements of the powerful impact of STEM media – statements that can form the cornerstone of a STEM/ISE media awareness campaign. The event will take place in conjunction with the NSF PI Meeting in March 2012, capitalizing on the momentum generated at a media convening organized by the Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) in July of 2011. The approximately 30 attendees will include participants in the July Convening and other STEM media professionals, all representing the subfields of Film, Television, Radio, and the increasingly important and diverse Online/Digital field, plus research and evaluation specialists and CAISE staff. The agenda will emphasize the potential of cross-platform collaborations and define a second agenda for a larger annual meeting that will include the larger community of STEM professionals.
New mobile device features and the growing proportion of visitors carrying mobiles allow the range of museum exhibit design possibilities to be expanded. In particular, we see opportunities for using mobiles to help exhibits scale up to support variable-sized groups of visitors, and to support collaborative visitor-visitor interactions. Because exhibit use is generally one-time-only, any interfaces created for these purposes must be easily learnable, or visitors may not use the exhibit at all. To guide the design of learnable mobile interfaces, we chose to employ the Consistency design
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Priscilla Jimenez PazminoLeilah Lyons
Realizing the power of CyberLearning to transform education will require vision, strategy, and an engaged, talented community. Activities are needed to energize the community, refine and sharpen the path forward, and provide a more active and ongoing forum for clarifying the big ideas and challenging questions. In response to this need, SRI International, together with the Lawrence Hall of Science and with key support from the National Geographic Society, will organize a set of activities to advance a shared vision of the future of learning, encompassing the systems, people, and technology dimensions mutually necessary for any scalable and lasting advances in education. The innovative format for these activities is inspired by the TED talks, Wikipedia, and social networking. As in TED, a small set of leading researchers will be selected to give very short, very high quality, stimulating talks. These CyberLearning Talks will be featured at a 1-day summit meeting in Washington, DC, streamed so that local cyberlearning research communities may participate at a distance, and posted on a website. As in Wikipedia, CyberLearning Pages will be created, each page featuring a synopsis of a big idea in CyberLearning and the relevant research challenges. The 1-day conference will be followed by a small 1-day workshop focusing on how to evaluate cyberlearning efforts, identify progress, and identify important new directions. Finally, to disseminate and stimulate conversation about both the video talks and Wikipedia entries, a presence for the community will be created on social networking sites. The target outcomes of the effort will be (i) a cyberlearning research community with participants from across the many current constituent communities, and fostered awareness and appreciation of the broad range of expertise and interests across that wider community; (ii) foundations for sustained discussion of big ideas, insights, and challenges to help this new community define a more engaged, crisper vision of its own future, (iii) a community resource that can become a site for interconnecting stakeholders in the CyberLearning community and supporting investigators in improving field-generated proposals, and (iv) an emerging sense of direction for CyberLearning among a wider audience of leaders. Such community building and awareness is expected to foster collaborations that will lead to innovative and research-grounded ways of using technology to transform education -- formal and informal and across a lifetime.
The Golden Gate Bridge Highway Transportation District (GGBHTD), in collaboration with the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE), and in partnership with Princeton University, Stanford University, San Jose State University, the Sciencenter (Ithaca, NY), the Exploratorium (San Francisco), Eyethink, West Wind Laboratory, EHDD Architects, the American Public Works Association, and the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, is conducting a multi-faceted project about the science and engineering of the Golden Gate Bridge and about how public works facilities around the country can potentially become sites for public understanding of and engagement with science and engineering. GGBHTD, which operates and maintains the bridge, ferries and buses, hosts over 10-million visitors annually to their current visitor center at the south end of the bridge (San Francisco), serves an additional 2-million users of their ferries, and hosts a popular Web site (http://goldengatebridge.org/). The project deliverables are scheduled to coincide in 2012 with the 75th anniversary of the 1937 opening of the bridge. Educational products include: outdoor exhibits at the Golden Gate Bridge; exhibits about the bridge on the District's ferries; indoor exhibits at the Exploratorium; an expanded Web site with educational material about the bridge; an international conference in San Francisco around the time of the anniversary about public works as sites for informal science education; educational documents and a professional development program for public works staff from around the country; and a suite of publications for the public and professionals on public works research. The project involves a coordinated evaluation effort. Front-end and formative evaluation activities are being conducted by Inverness Research Associates. Summative evaluation will be conducted by David Heil & Associates.
Cosmic Serpent - Bridging Native and Western Science Learning in Informal Settings is a four-year collaboration between the Indigenous Education Institute and the University of California-Berkeley targeting informal science education professionals. This project is designed to explore the commonalities between western science and native science in the context of informal science education. The intended impacts are to provide informal science education professionals with the skills and tools to gain an understanding of the commonalities between native and western worldviews; create regional networks that bridge native and museum communities; develop science education programs in which learners cross cultural borders between western science and indigenous peoples; and meet the needs of diverse audiences using culturally-responsive approaches to science learning. Participants are introduced to topics in physical, earth, space, and life science, using an interdisciplinary approach. Deliverables include professional development workshops, peer mentoring, museum programs for public audiences, a project website, and media products for use in programs and exhibits. Additionally, regional partnerships between museums and native communities, a legacy document, and a culminating conference jointly hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian and the Association of Science and Technology Centers will promote future sustainability. Strategic impact is realized through participants' increased understanding of native and western science paradigms, museum programs that reflect commonalities in the two approaches, partnerships between museums and native communities, and increased institutional capacity to engage native audiences in science. This project directly impacts 270 informal educators at 96 science centers and tribal/cultural museums nationally while the resulting programs will reach an estimated 200,000 museum visitors.