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.
This report grew out of a workshop and follow-up session sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR). The two-day workshop and subsequent meeting sought to develop and validate evaluation practices to assess the value of NSF's investment in broadening participation across all directorates and programs. Invited participants included NSF grantees, professional evaluators, and the policy community (which included representatives from Congress, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), NSF staff, and staff from other federal agencies).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Fitzgerald BramwellPatricia CampbellBeatriz Chu ClewellDarnella DavisNorman FortenberryAntonio GarciaDonna NelsonAdam StollVeronica Thomas
Since 2005, the IMLS Office of Museum Services has funded research projects under the auspices of the National Leadership Grant program. These grants support projects that ‘raise the bar’ in museum research and practice. Funded projects have national impact and generate findings that, through broad dissemination, move the field forward. This project was funded in the program’s inaugural round. Why Zoos and Aquariums Matter: Working with Community Perceptions to Achieve Your Goals draws on the illuminating research conducted as part of the IMLS-funded study. Its findings provide useful
This slide describes historical trends in museum funding, showing the changing shares of government, private, earned income, and investments in museum business models.
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American Association of Museums
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
A recent article published in Science Communication addresses the training issue in issue in our discipline. Henk Mulder and his colleagues discuss the shared features that university curricula should or could have to favour the full admission of science communication into the academic circle. Having analysed analogies and differences in the curricula that a number of schools provide all over the world, the authors reached the conclusion that much remains to be done. Science communication seems far from having found shared fundamental references, lessons that cannot be missed in the practical
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 volume “Il libro contemporaneo” (The Contemporary Book) by Giuseppe Vitiello offers a global view of the “book” as a model and as an instrument of communication and for learning in the society of knowledge; it specifically deals with scientific editorial communication, through a complete and systematic reconstruction of the bodies involved, of the production and dissemination processes, also in the framework of the technological changes pushed by new media. In particular, the author critically analyzes some relevant aspects such as the role played by the journal as the most relevant mean
In his latest book titled “Communication power”, the famous sociologist of information society Manuel Castells focuses on the way in which power takes shape and acts in information societies, and the role of communication in defining, structuring, and changing it. From the rise of “mass self-communication” to the role of environmental movements and neuropolitics, the network is the key structure at play and the main lens used to analyse the transformations we are witnessing. To support his thesis Castells links media studies, power theory and brain science, but his insistence on networks puts
In January this year, the US saw the publication of the preview of an impressive review work on the practices and the studies concerning learning science outside schools and universities, i.e. what is referred to as informal education. The document, promoted by the National Science Council of scientific academies (National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine), is the result of the work by a committee comprising 14 specialists who collected, discussed and then organized hundreds of documents on pedagogical premises, places, practices and pursuits
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.