The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC « Informal science education research

With the holiday season upon us, Santa Claus has been busy. He’s been working at the mall, smiling on billboards, clinging to windows and perching on treetops. With nostalgia in the air and family on our minds, my wife and I have also been busy sharing our childhood experiences of Christmas. The similarities and differences in our experiences of this holiday got me thinking.

I didn’t grow up believing in Santa Claus, at least in the literal sense. I was taught from an early age that Santa Claus was a symbol of everything we do and feel surrounding the holidays. To my parents, this was both a matter of honesty and an opportunity to discuss the importance of everything Santa embodied. Christmas was always a big deal for my family, and Santa was always present along with the Muppets Christmas album and our beloved plastic tree (evergreens are hard to find in Florida).

My wife grew up believing in Santa Claus, and she firmly believes her childhood Christmases were more meaningful as a result. She waited for reindeer, listened for Santa, and is grateful to have grown up believing that—at least once a year—magic could exist. Belief in Santa Claus was a way for her to experience a sense of wonder and possibility that can become difficult to sustain in adulthood.

Do these experiences represent distinct epistemologies passed onto us by our parents? Does Santa Claus tell us something about what kind of knowledge we value? Let us know what your family’s traditions—by no means restricted to the few I have mentioned—have taught you.

Enjoy your holidays, everybody.

I found this article by Paul Marks while browsing New Scientist a few days ago. IKEA is one of several store chains using the Indoor Positioning System (IPS) component of Google Maps to help their shoppers navigate. Marks also discusses some other IPS systems:

“Nokia’s version of IPS, not yet available to consumers, aims for even greater precision. The firm litters buildings of interest with Bluetooth-based radio beacons that switch phones running mapping apps based on GPS to using Bluetooth 4.0 signals once they walk indoors. Because the beacons are at fixed sites and have a short range, they can work out your position to within 30 centimetres – enough to “bookmark” a jacket in a shop window and browse back to it later.” [Link in original]

Will this change the way people relate to, and interact with, their surroundings more than GPS and existing applications such as foursquare already have? Tell us what you think.

Also, if you’re going to IKEA, could you pick up some meatballs for us? Thanks.

Mark and Katie identified a useful model for data collection using the face-recognition system. That model is Dungeons & Dragons. Visitors come with goals in mind, often in groups, and they take on a variety of roles within those groups. D&D and similar role-playing games provide a ready set of rules and procedures for modeling this kind of situation.

In practice, this means the Visitor Center exhibit space will be divided into a grid, with the system recording data based on proximity, direction and attributes of agents (visitors, volunteers and staff) and the grid squares themselves.

For example, the cabinet of whale sculptures inside the front door would occupy a row of “artifact” squares on the grid. Visitor interactions would be recorded accordingly. Interactions with the exhibit would update each visitor’s individual profile to reflect engagement and potential learning. To use only-slightly-more D&D terms, spending time at the whale exhibit would add modifiers to, say, the visitor’s “Biology” and “Ocean Literacy” attributes. The same goes for volunteers and staff members, taking into account their known familiarity with certain material.

Mark and Katie have drafted what is essentially a dungeon map of the VC, complete with actual D&D miniatures. Staff members will even have character sheets, of a sort, to represent their knowledge in specific areas—this being a factor in their interactions with visitors.

In a visitor group scenario Mark walked me through today, the part of the touch pool volunteer was played by what I believe was a cleric of some sort. Mark has happily taken to the role of Dungeon Master.

This all forms a basic framework, but the amount and specificity of data we can collect and analyze in this way is staggering. We can also refer back to the original video to check for specific social interactions and other factors the face-recognition software might have missed.

In other news, Ursula will be released Friday morning. Here’s the word from Jordan:

“Wednesday afternoon the HMSC Husbandry team decided that now is the best time to release Ursula back into the wild. Our octopus from British Columbia is as feisty as ever and we feel that she is in good health. Because of this, we will be preparing Ursula for her journey back to the ocean Friday, December 23, 2011. We invite you to attend starting at 8:30 a.m. in the Visitor Center. We will then proceed to release her off Yaquina’s South Jetty about 9 .a.m.”

Here’s a fascinating piece from Scientific American by Larry Greenemeier. It concerns data-mining software developed by Harvard University and the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. The software in question is a component of the Maximal Information-based Nonparametric Exploration (MINE) program.

“The software teases out relationships among data points (potentially millions of them) and measures the strength of these connections. As the researchers report in a paper appearing in the December 16 issue of the journal Science, most data-mining tools used today can either find correlations between data or determine how solid those connections are—few can do both.” [Link in original]

Greenemeier summarizes the results of the program’s initial runs on World Health Organization and Major League Baseball data. Check it out.

I’ve tried to describe my job and workplace to strangers a few times. Most often, these attempts have been met with looks of concern for an obviously unwell man. Is this a common experience for other folks working in UX, museums, zoos and aquariums?

A friend of mine in Orlando reported via Facebook yesterday that she spent part of her shift scrubbing a horseshoe crab with a toothbrush. How do you work that into a conversation? When the eye-tracking systems arrive early next year, I myself may stop and wonder if I’m actually just standing at a bus stop somewhere, making people very nervous. However, I am genuinely interested in how we respond to the question “What do you do?” Please comment.

Here’s an update on Ursula and our new octopus from Jordan, our senior aquarist. It seems Ursula’s situation and its attendant considerations have changed since I last discussed it here:

“As many of you know Ursula has begun expelling eggs and has been very inactive the past few weeks; even taking the unexpected step of barricading herself in her corner with the curtain. She continued by pulling rocks and PVC pipe around her to make a cave. Ursula has also been receiving live Dungeness crabs the last two weeks as well, instead of her normal fish and squid. This is to better acclimate her to a wild setting should she be released. If anyone can donate more live Dungeness it would be greatly appreciated.

In the West Wing our new octopus has been eating voraciously and has quite the feisty personality. During her Sunday morning feeding she was shooting water at us with her siphon, which as you can imagine was very surprising. She greedily her mackerel in under 3 minutes. Once quarantined, she should be a wonderful addition to the Visitor Center.

The past few weeks have been filled with heavy cleaning, de-leeching, and of course finals. Coming out of this last term, I think that I speak for the entire husbandry team when I say that we are looking forward to winter break. With more free time available, you can expect us to be around even more over the next month. Our goal is to have the Visitor Center looking immaculate entering the New Year.

Happy Holidays from the HMSC Husbandry Team”

Have you seen the quarantine Octocam?

Here’s an explanation from the Octocam main page:

“Since the main tank Octocam has been out of commission for replacement with a more sophisticated model, we’ve taken the opportunity to aim a small Webcam at the quarantine tank… The new octopus is active and curious, and there’s a good chance you’ll see her and watch her interact with our animal husbandry staff if you check in when she’s awake[.]”

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

I saw Mommy deconstructing Santa Claus

For last-minute holiday shoppers… (From New Scientist)

Exhibit of Learning (+10 Wisdom)

Interesting data-mining tool (from Scientific American)

What do you do?

Quarantine Cam

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