Katie Stofer « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Beverly Serrell, a pioneer in tracking museum visitors (or stalking them, as some of us like to say), has just released a nice report on the Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) web site. In “Paying More Attention to Paying Attention,” Serrell describes the growing use of metrics she calls tracking and timing (T&T) in the museum field since the publication of her book on the topic in 1998. As the field has more widely adopted these T&T strategies, Serrell has continued her work doing meta-analysis of these studies and has developed a system to describe some of the main implications of the summed findings for exhibition design.

I’ll leave you to read the details, but it really drove home to me the potential excitement and importance of the cyberlab’s tracking setup. Especially for smaller museums that have minimal staff, implementing an automatic tracking schemes, even on a temporary basis, could save a lot of person-hours in collecting this simple, yet vital data about exhibition and exhibit element use. It could allow more data collection of this type in the prototyping stages, especially, which might yield important data on the optimum density of exhibit pieces before a full exhibition is installed. On the other hand, if we can’t get it to work, or our automated design proves ridiculously unwieldy (stay tuned for some upcoming posts on our plans for 100 cameras in our relatively-small 15000 square foot space), it will only affirm the need for good literal legwork that Serrell also notes is a great introduction to research for aspiring practicioners. In any case, the eye tracking as an additional layer of information that we use to help explain engagement and interest in particular exhibit pieces might lead eventually to a measure that lends more insight into Serrell’s Thorough Use.

(Thanks to the Museum Education Monitor and Jen Wyld for the tip about this report.)

Dr. Rowe advises several students each year, from many of the programs on campus that have education tracks as well as the main Science and Math Education Free-Choice Learning program. We meet as a group regularly, and yesterday we got into the subject of time management. Dr. Rowe has responsibilities both as a professor and as the Interim Director of Education for Oregon Sea Grant, and he was sharing that in the face of his administrative responsibilities, especially, the “research activities” often get pushed to the side.

As a PhD candidate, I am in the process of tweaking my proposal to send to my committee. Yet it is so much more tempting to spend my time doing things for the development of the cyberlab tools, which I am paid to spend about 20 hours a week on. To me, right now, it seems so much more concrete and efficient. For example, for my proposal, I’ve just spent about half an hour in a frustrating (and so far, futile) search on the web and in the school library for an article to cite for a fact that I know but haven’t had to cite in a while. If I had spent a half hour updating the inventory database for the lab, however, I would have tangible results in the form of organized entries for a number of our new technology items.

Forcing myself to write or revise is a chore, but ultimately, when I get into it, intellectually rewarding, aside from the futile citation searches. Breaking writing tasks down into more manageable chunks than “write a research proposal” seems to be a lot harder than seeing the finite chunks for the lab development. What other strategies do we use as researchers to be sure to make research progress and not let things “drag” on our to-do lists as we accomplish more obvious, yet perhaps less important, tasks?

To give Harrison a break from his diligent posting over the holidays, here’s our “2011 holiday card.” It features several of the lovely ladies of the lab with Harrison, taken at our recent Education Team Retreat. Even educators take a little time to relax sometimes (hint hint, Harrison!).

One of the key techniques in museum and free-choice learning evaluation and research is the idea of visitor or user observation by the staff. When we’re trying to observe them in a “natural” state, and figure out how they are really behaving, for example. We call this observation unobtrusive. The reality is we are rarely so discreet. How do you convince regular visitors that that staff member wearing a uniform and scribbling on a clipboard near enough to eavesdrop on you is not actually stalking them? You don’t, that is, until you turn to a lot of technological solutions as our new lab will be doing.

We’ve spent a lot of hours dreaming up the way this new system is going to work and trying to make the observations of speech, actions, and more esoteric things like interests and goals hidden to the visitor’s eye. Whether we succeed or not will be the subject of many new sets of evaluations with our three new exhibits and more. Laura’s looxcie-based research will be one of these.

Over the years we’ve gathered lots of data about what people tend to do when either they truly don’t know they’re being watched, or they don’t care. In addition, we’ve gathered some ideas of how visitors react to the idea of participating in our studies, from flat-out asking us what we’re trying to figure out, to just giving us the hairy eyeball and perhaps skipping the exhibit we’re working on. A lot of these turn into frustrations for the staff as we must throw out that subject, or start our counting for randomization over. So as we go through the design process, I’m going to share some of my observations of myself gathering visitor data through observations and surveys. These two collection tools are ones we hope to readily automate to the benefit of both the visitors who feel uncomfortable under obvious scrutiny and the researcher who suffers the pangs of rejection.

One of the most important outcomes of our new Lab’s efforts will be in expanding our collaborations in order to advance the field. To that end, we started with the Sea Grant Education retreat that Harrison wrote about, outlining where the Lab fits in with the new vision of an education program and the Hatfield Visitor Center. We continued our discussions by having the Education team join in with the Sea Grant Extension folks this past week as they retreated for their own planning (though they got to go further away than just across the Bay, as Education did). For those of you unfamiliar with Sea Grant Extension, they’re similar to the Agricultural Extension programs that are the community outreach arm of Land Grant university programs: “The primary role of Oregon Sea Grant Extension is to be a trusted broker that provides the interface among scientists, managers, and the public, including stakeholders.’ – from the Oregon Sea Grant Extension website.

We met, first of all, and each took a few moments to explain what we do. As with the education retreat, there was a mix of who knew a lot of people from working together before, and who didn’t. The other task we took some time on was one we’d worked on as an Education team: 1) defining what “free-choice learning” means, 2) figuring out what we already do that is or isn’t “FCL,” and 3) deciding if and how to proceed to incorporate more FCL practices into our work. In both groups, we found that a lot of ways we are already working with our constituents use free-choice learning techniques. Moreover, both groups (Education and Extension) felt that these were effective styles to use whenever possible. The sticking point came with how much choice and control learners could have; for Extension, often, and especially K-12 school group programming, attendance is either mandated by regulation changes or by a teacher, neither of which situation was felt to provide the learner much choice or control. However, we felt that the more we could structure our delivery to center around the learner, the more effective and more positive the experiences could potentially be. Of course, all of these changes will require careful planning and ongoing evaluation. Good thing our Education and Extension programs are well-versed in these ideas. Now we just need a more coordinated effort so as to keep on top of things and not duplicate efforts.

Some choice quotes: Pat Corcoran describing his work as “feral-choice learning,” and Cait Goodwin noting that creating Quests “sounds like it should be easy, but it isn’t.” How apropos both of these were to the conversations as a whole. All in all, it was obvious that we have a lot of areas where we can (and often already do) help each other out. Here’s to continuing those relations as we all share the mission of supporting coastal and ocean resource research, outreach, and conservation.

It’s time for more product research. This time, it’s survey apps for the iPad. We’re in the process of acquiring a set of iPads that we’ll be able to sync together to deploy surveys. Our main requirements are customizability of the survey questions and answers and ability to collect data off-line, so museums can collect data with their visitors on the exhibit floor, no matter whether or not they have wi-fi, which a number don’t.

Having learned the value of the spreadsheet with my last product research endeavor, I immediately started creating categories as I looked at the first app’s features. It turned out to be a bit like coding qualitative data; the first product reveals a certain number of codes, the next might add to the list somewhat, and so on until you reach saturation and can just apply the “code book” to all the products. There are a surprising number of pricing schemes – by the survey, by the number of users and responses, and various combinations of those. Ultimately, we’ll prioritize the categories and in this case, consider costs as well, but so far, one product reveals itself as the standard. As our software developer said of a similar process with face recognition systems this morning, so far, there’s no reason to eliminate this one from consideration, though we may find something we like even better.

In the process, we’re also evaluating the use of a case with a handhold as well as a stylus. The stylus may help those less techno-savvy visitors, but it is so small it could walk off if not properly secured. One solution may be a tether to the iPad case. The catch is that once we add the case and tether the stylus, the iPad no longer fits in its original box, which may make it more difficult to ship around to various sites. Stay tuned for updates.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Author Archives: Katie Stofer

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