RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
Mid-America Science Museum will implement a professional development program for its education staff and those from member museums of the Arkansas Discovery Network. Museum staffers will participate in a series of three day-long workshops on robotics, app development, and microprocessors. Workshop follow-up will be in the form of strategically scheduled internet-based meetings, an online community, and various methods of evaluation. The program will provide up-to-date professional development and training in newer technologies for educators in the museum and from across Arkansas. Training will encourage these educators to develop their own activities to increase audience engagement and use modern technology to create powerful professional development opportunities for teachers. The project will advance the museum's strategic goal of being a leader in informal science education and creating professional development opportunities for museum educators across the region.
The Richmond Public Library will create The Richmond Digital Health Literacy Project to provide low-income residents with tools and skills needed to access online information to improve their health. Participants will learn how to gain access to digital reference materials, e-books, mobile library offerings, and other resources. The project will bring together groups of participants around the topic of health information to develop customized online health curricula, provide training to 180 low-income residents in digital health literacy, and supply free broadband and wireless antennae to public computer centers. These activities will enable participants to develop skills and access relevant digital content to improve the health and the overall quality of life of Richmond residents.
A two stage summative evaluation was conducted following the launch of the Mystic Seaport for Educators website, the final output resulting from the IMLS National Leadership grant entitled Mystic E-Port Digital Classroom project. The results of four focus groups, conducted in two phases, found consistent results suggesting that the project was successful at achieving all four goals as outlined in the original grant proposal. Appendix includes focus group protocol.
Funded jointly by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the and Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) and Urban Libraries Council (ULC), Learning Labs in Libraries and Museums supports the planning and design of 24 learning labs in libraries and museums nationwide. The inaugural cohort of 12 sites ran from January 2012 to June 2013, and a second cohort of 12 additional sites began in January 2013 and will extend through June 2014. In addition to the primary awardees, most grants included additional institutional partners, resulting in a rich community including over 100 professionals from approximately 50 participating organizations (libraries, museums, universities, and community-based organizations). The labs are intended to engage middle- and high-school youth in mentor-led, interest-based, youth-centered, collaborative learning using digital and traditional media. Inspired by YOUmedia, an innovative digital space for teens at the Chicago Public Library, as well as innovations in science and technology centers, projects participating in Learning Labs are expected to provide prototypes for the field based on current research about digital media and youth learning, and build a "community of practice" among the grantee institutions and practitioners interested in developing similar spaces.
Museums continue to invest in and experiment with internet technologies and increasingly with social software environments (i.e., social networking). These technologies have the potential to lead to a number of important intellectual and social outcomes such as learning, community building, and greater public understanding of, in our case, science. It is the possibility of supporting learning in digital environments that is the focus of this research project. In our previous work, online facilitation has emerged as a big deal and perhaps determines successful online museum environments from unsuccessful environments. To study facilitation, we seek to understand facilitation styles and their outcomes in two distinct but representative museum environments. The first, Science Buzz at Science Museum of Minnesota, is a popular website identified by the field to be exemplary because of its educational value and its use of Web 2.0 functionality. The second case is the more distributed use of social software at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science (MLS). Instead of creating learning platforms that are hosted internally, MLS is experimenting with building learning communities where people are already gathering on the web like Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. We anticipate being able to identify clear, replicable facilitation styles and to identify outcomes associated with those styles.
Researchers at Michigan State University, University of Washington, Science Museum of Minnesota, and Museum of Life and Science found that there are clear indicators of learning in Science Buzz (www.sciencebuzz.org), the online museum environment studied as part of the Take 2 project. People who participate in conversations through the Buzz blog demonstrate an interest in science, and they leverage their own experiences and identities in order to share science knowledge with others. Researchers utilized indicators of learning as identified in the National Academies report on Learning Science in Informal Environments. Aspects of learning that were particularly important for an online environment like Science Buzz were interest in science, participating in science through the use of language, and identifying as someone who knows about or uses science. Researchers found that Science Buzz participants had a strong interest in scientific issues, utilized argumentation strategies--an important scientific practice--and identified with the importance of science in their lives. In particular: (1) Interest in scientific issues, caring about scientific issues, identifying personally with scientific issues were commonly evident in Science Buzz; (2) There is widespread use of argumentation in relation to scientific issues, an important scientific practice, although the quality of the scientific reasoning associated with these argumentation practices varies; (3) The co-construction of identity between online participants and the host museum is a potentially powerful outcome, as it suggests that online learning environments can facilitate longer-term relationships; (4) The analytical tools developed by this project advance our ability to understand learning in online environments; (5) While some indicators of learning are present, others, such as reflecting on science or co-constructing science knowledge with others, are not present. For museums, encouraging museum staff to engage digital tools and online participants is relatively easy. However, measuring online activity with regard to complex outcomes like learning is extremely difficult. Perhaps the most useful outcome of the Take 2 project, therefore, is a tool that will enable museums to make sense of online activity in relation to powerful outcomes like learning.
The Take Two Institutional Research Study was an ethnographic case study of the contributions of Web 2.0 philosophy and technologies to museum practice and staff development at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina. It used a naturalistic methodology to investigate staff members' relationships with each other and their publics as the Museum developed and embraced a philosophy of Web 2.0 experimentation, shared authority, and co-creation. An important element in developing Web 2.0 culture at the Museum of Life and Science was leadership that encouraged experimentation and