Today’s standardized testing methods are too narrow for measuring 21st-century learning that occurs across time and diverse social contexts, from formal to informal and embodied to virtual. This paper uses the concept of “connected learning” to illustrate what 21st-century education involves; it then describes research methods for documenting this learning.
Feinstein and Meshoulam’s study examines the nature of equity work in museums and science centres across the U.S. Based on 32 interviews with leaders from 15 informal science education organisations, the authors identified two different perspectives, client and cooperative, each with its own strengths and implications for informal science education.
One challenge in scaling up effective educational programs is how to adjust implementation to local contexts. One solution that the authors Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, and Sabelli propose is “design-based implementation research,” (DBIR) in which researchers and practitioners collaboratively identify problems and strategies during implementation while learning from this process to support innovations in new contexts.
This annual report presents an overview of Saint Louis Science Center audience data gathered through a variety of evaluation studies conducted during 2014. This report includes information on the Science Center's general public audience demographics and visitation patterns, gives an overview of visitors' comments about their Science Center experience, summarizes major trends observed in the Science Center's tool for tracking educational programs, and presents highlights from front-end evaluations of a new exhibit about the Mars rovers.
Life on Earth is interactive software installed as a museum touchtable exhibit that uses data about over seventy thousand (70,000) species from several databases to help visitors explore and deepen their understanding of biodiversity, evolution and common ancestry, and the history of life on earth (DeepTree/ FloTree). Some installations also include a smaller exhibit that poses puzzle challenges about evolutionary relationships among species (Build-a-Tree (BAT)). The exhibit was installed at four natural history museums across the U.S. – the Harvard Museum of Natural History (Cambridge, MA)
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Harvard UnivesityJim HammermanAmy SpiegelJonathan Christiansen
Interactive surfaces are increasingly common in museums and other informal learning environments where they are seen as a medium for promoting social engagement. However, despite their increasing prevalence, we know very little about factors that contribute to collaboration and learning around interactive surfaces. In this paper we present analyses of visitor engagement around several multi-touch tabletop science exhibits. Observations of 629 visitors were collected through two widely used techniques: video study and shadowing. We make four contributions: 1) we present an algorithm for
During the first EU-funded project EUSCE/X (European Science Communication Events / Extended), a "White Book" was developed in 2005, containing the experiences of exploring 21 European science engagement events like science festivals. The White Book has 13 chapters ranging from "purpose and philosophy" across "management", "education", "funding" to "European dimension".
This article explains the concepts of disruptive innovation and catalytic innovation, a subset of disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovations challenge industry incumbents by offering simpler, good-enough alternatives to an underserved group of customers, whereas catalytic innovations can surpass the status quo by providing good-enough solutions to inadequately addressed social problems.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Clayton ChristensenHeather BaumannRandy RugglesThomas Sadtler
In the paper I argue for a certain way of theorizing and studying learning. Learning is seen as situated in social practice, and in the pursuit of most learning persons are seen as moving around in social practice. They are involved in personal trajectories across various social contexts of practice. Even more so, these social contexts and the links between them, which persons learning draw on in their pursuit of learning, are institutionally arranged in various ways, and this affects the opportunities and nature of learning processes. These arguments about the nature of learning, theories of
In 2010 the Royal Society journal Biology Letters published an article, ‘Blackawton bees’, which caused something of a sensation: the findings, on bees’ foraging patterns, were original, but the true originality lay in the fact the experiments were in part devised, and the paper written, by a group of 8- to 10-year-old children at Blackawton Primary School in Devon (Blackawton et al., 2011).[1] The article attracted considerable media attention, troubling, as it did, the boundaries of professional science, and distinctions between scientific practice and education, not to mention the
Increasing numbers of museums and galleries worldwide have developed an array of working practices that might be termed 'participatory' or 'co-creative', which seek to involve visitors, non-visitors, community and interest groups with diverse forms of expertise and perspective in their activities. Frequently the central aim of such practices has been to strengthen relationships between a museum and its audiences through projects that are jointly conceived and developed with local communities. However, relatively little attention has been given to participatory practice within the work of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katy BunningJen KavanaghKayte McSweeneyRichard Sandell
This paper examines the approach of a major new gallery on information and communication technologies in the Science Museum, situating it in the context of current ideas around the history of technology and exploring the way the curatorial team addressed the challenges of display and interpretation. As a short discussion piece it looks at four broad questions: How has the concept of information, and more importantly an ‘Information Age’ been conceived across differing disciplines? What opportunities can user focused histories present to a gallery on information and communication technologies