Daily Archives: October 25, 2010

Sea Grant, State Parks collaborate on iPhone guide to newest park

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NEWPORT – A new iPhone application gives visitors an inside look at Oregon’s newest state park, the Beaver Creek State Natural Area south of Newport.

The application, “Paddle Beaver Creek,” was developed jointly by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department and Oregon Sea Grant at Oregon State University. It is available free for downloading from the iPhone store.

The project is designed to provide park visitors with an additional way to learn more about the park. “We are adapting to the needs of present and future generations of park visitors,” stated Mike Rivers, Ranger Supervisor for Oregon State Parks. “Having a park-specific smart phone guide to water trails, wildlife and natural history will hopefully deepen our visitors’ experiences in Oregon State Parks’ 2010 park of the year, Beaver Creek State Natural Area.”

The core of the application is an interactive map of the Beaver Creek Water Trail – about three scenic miles of an easy-paddling waterway in a pristine coastal marsh open to kayaks and canoes. With no feasible way to post interpretive signs along a water trail, the application provides iPhone-equipped canoeists and kayakers a way to track their progress via GPS, and interactively highlights points of interest along the way, from nesting ospreys to beaver lodges.

Oregon Sea Grant’s interest in developing new tools for effective science education brought them to this cooperative project. “We are always exploring tools that deepen understanding of the coast,” said Dr. Shawn Rowe, Sea Grant Extension’s free-choice learning specialist at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. “Giving visitors the ability to seek the depth of information they prefer is the future of parks and interpretive centers.”

Beaver Creek State Natural Area  is located seven miles south of Newport, just east of Ona Beach State Park. The park, which celebrated its grand opening Oct. 1, offers recreation for boaters and nonboaters alike. A newly created Visitor Center features interpretive exhibits, an ADA-accessible deck overlooking the wetland, and trail access. Free Wi-Fi access allows visitors to download the iPhone App on the spot.

Other Sea Grant personnel involved in conceptualizing and creating the application and coordinating logistics include Mark Farley, Nancee Hunter, Joe Cone and Evelyn Paret. Plans are in the works for additional applications, in versions for a variety of mobile smart-phone platforms.

Oregon Sea Grant, founded in 1968 and based at Oregon State University, supports research, education, and public engagement to help people understand, responsibly use, and conserve ocean and coastal resources.

Still time to register for Heceta Head conference

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FLORENCE – There’s still time to register for the 6th annual Heceta Head Conference, with a theme of “Oregon’s Ocean: Working Waterfronts,” this Thursday and Friday (Oct. 28-29) at the Florence Events Center.

The conference kicks off Thursday afternoon with a 2 pm tour of the Siuslaw River estuary and Florence’s working waterfront, including a river boat trip for the first 36 reservations. After the tour, join Oregon State University anthropologist Court Smith for dinner and a talk about “Salmon Peoples of the Northwest.”

Friday’s conference includes sessions about Oregon’s working waterfronts, estuary conservation and development, commercial fishing infrastructure needs, port planning and smart growth for coastal communities, along with a keynote address and panels about the relocation of NOAA’s Pacific research fleet to Newport, and partnerships for waterfront development featuring speakers from Bandon, Astoria, Coos Bay and Florence.

Registration for the Thursday dinner is $20, and for Friday’s conference and lunch is $25. The Thursday afternoon tour is free but reservations are requested. To register, visit http://www.HecetaHeadConference.org. Registration will also be accepted at the door.

This year’s conference is organized by Oregon Sea Grant in collaboration with Heceta Head Coastal Conference.

NPR features free-choice learning

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In National Public Radio’s science blog,  “13.7: Cosmos and Culture,” Ursula Goodenough writes:

Myth: The American populace is science-ignorant, lagging well behind other “developed” nations in scientific literacy.

Fact: It turns out that the U.S. curve is U-shaped: Elementary-school children perform as well in science-understanding metrics as their peers elsewhere, even though formal science teaching at these grade levels is at best sporadic, whereas middle- and high-school students perform abysmally even though they take required science courses. But American adults demonstrate scientific knowledge on a par or above adults in other “developed” countries, even though only 30 percent of adult Americans have ever taken even one college-level science course.

How to explain? Goodenough cites an “excellent” article in a recent edition of American Scientist by John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Oregon Sea Grant’s professors of free-choice learning. Falk and Dierking specialize in studying the kind of learning that takes place outside the classroom – the learning that we do on our own, by visiting museums and aquariums, reading, investigating things on the Internet or pursuing our passions, from star-gazing to collecting tropical fish.

It turns out that, for most Americans, free-choice learning is how we pick up most of what we know about science.  And while Falk and Dierking support efforts to improve school-based science literacy, they also call for broadening opportunities for adults to pursue their inherent curiosity about science, technology, engineering and math.

(Oregon Sea Grant’s Free-Choice Learning program is aiding in that effort by using OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center as a living lab for studying how people learn in informal settings. Read more at http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/visitor/free-choice-learning .

Read Goodenough’s blog entry  here.