Author Archives: Laura Good

About Laura Good

PhD Student, Science Education Free Choice Learning

Conversations About Conversations at Portland Art Museum

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Yesterday Shawn and I met with Jess Park at Portland Art Museum (PAM) about an exciting new evaluation project utilizing our looxcie cameras. We had some great conversation about how to capture visitor conversation and interactions in relation to PAM’s Museum Stories and Conversations About Art video-based program. The project will be one the first official evaluation partnerships we have developed under the flag of FCL lab!

PAM has developed these video-based experiences for visitors in order to deepen visitors’ engagement with objects, with each other, and with the museum.  Museum Stories features short video presentations of museum staff talking about specific objects in the collection that have some personal meaning for them. All videos are available on touch screen computers in one gallery of the museum, which also houses the areas where the stories are recorded as well as some of the objects from the museum featured in the stories.  These videos are also available on-line.  Conversations about Art is a series of short videos featuring conversations among experts focused on particular objects in the museum’s collection.  These are available on hand-held devices provided by the museum, as downloads to visitors’ personal hand-held devices, and on the museum website. PAM is now looking to expand the program, and wishes to document some of the predicted and unexpected impacts and outcomes of these projects for visitors. The evaluation will recruit visitors to wear the looxcie cameras during their visit to the pertinent exhibits, including that of object stories. We will likely also be interviewing some of the experts/artists involved in creating the  videos.

We spent time going over the looxcie technologies and how best to recruit visitors in the Art Museum space. We also created some test clips to help the PAM folks working on the evaluation better understand the potential of the video data collection process. I will post a follow up next week with some more details about how we’re using the looxcies.

Shawn and I come back from PAM feeling like the A-Team – we love it when an evaluation plan comes together.

Observing from the learner perspective

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I’ve been looking in to technologies that help observe a free choice learning experience from the learner perspective. My research interests center on interactions between learners and informal educators, and so I wanted a technology that helped record interactions from the learner perspective, but were as least obtrusive on that interaction as possible.

Originally I was interested in using handheld technologies (such as smartphones) for this task. Here the idea was to have the learner wear a handheld on a lanyard which would automatically tag and record their interactions with informal educators via QR codes or augmented reality symbols. However, this proved more complicated than originally thought (and produced somewhat dodgy video recordings!), so we looked for a simpler approach.

I am currently exploring how Bluetooth headsets can help this process. The “looxcie” is basically a Bluetooth headset equipped with a camera, which can be paired to a handheld device for recording or work independently. Harrison is expertly modeling this device in the photos. I am in the process of starting to pilot this technology in the visitor center, and have spent some time with the volunteer interpreters at HMSC demonstrating how this might be used for my research. Maureen and Becca helped me produce a test video at the octopus tank (link below).