Category Archives: Research

International Research on the Rise

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My apologies as I was supposed to post this yesterday but with all of our Labor Day activities I forgot to publish it.

I thought I would take a break from the wave tank activities I am working on at the Hatfield Marine Science Center and write about a different but equally exciting part of my academic life. I am finally back on track with my PhD since returning from maternity leave. Hurray!

It is set, I will conduct my research in my home country – Brazil! The plan is to write my proposal in the Fall and collect data next Summer. I have been reading all the relevant literature available for Brazilian museum research and the likes. I  have a Brazilian museologist as a co-adviser, who specializes in family studies and who will help us establish a partnership among our group and their research’s group at the “Museum da Vida”, which means Museum of Life in portuguese (http://www.museudavida.fiocruz.br). Within the Brazilian context, the largest percentage of museum visitors are composed of school/academic groups and a great number of Brazilian museums are cultural/historical museums. However, I have decided to do research on a  Brazilian FCL environment focused on marine education. As of now I have a couple of options but I will likely do research at the  “Centro do Peixe-Boi” (Manatee Center) located on a Northeast island called Itamaraca in my home state of Pernambuco.

I still have not completely decided the aspects I will be looking at but quite possibly will involve the atypical groups of visitors composed of families that come to the beach and conveniently visit the center as it sits in such a prime location. It is an argument that such visitors may not even see the center as a museum, so it would be great to investigate their perceptions and how they compare it to other more “clearly” defined museums. My Fall semester will be filled with excitment as Shawn and I decide the focus of our research, which will also depends on logistics and partners we can acquire there to facilitate my research. Therefore, Shawn and I are planning a trip to Brazil soon to establish a partnership between our group and my co-adviser’s research group. We will have the chance to talk about the research we do at Hatfield to the Brazilian museum researchers, present my proposal and start networking.

I am really excited to dive into this and start contribute to a field yet to be further developed in Brazil. I am quite confident our proposal will be well received  among the local marine educator community and will open the doors to many more that maybe “YOU” can be involved with.  I will post more details about the project as we go…

Susan

 

Learning more about getting everyone DOING science

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Katie Woollven tells us about how she’s learning more about getting everyone DOING science research, aka Citizen Science or Public Participation in Science Research:

“I’ve been interested in Citizen Science research since I began my grad program, so I was really excited to attend the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) conference Aug 4-5 in Portland. The speakers were great, and it was nice to see how my questions about citizen science fit with the current research in this field.

Although public participation has always been important to science throughout history and is NOT new, the field of research on citizen science IS relatively new, and is somewhat disjointed. Researchers in this field lack a common language (prime example: should we call it PPSR? or citizen science?), which makes it difficult to stay abreast of the latest research. There have been calls for a national PPSR organization, one of the conference goals was to get feedback from people in the field about what they would want that organization to do.

One of my favorite talks was from Heidi Ballard of UC Davis, who is interested in all the possible individual, programmatic, and especially community-level outcomes of PPSR projects. She asked questions about the degree and quality of participation, such as: Who participates in these projects, and in what parts of the scientific process? Whose interests are being served, and to what end? Who makes the decisions, and who has the power?

Another interesting part of Heidi’s talk was when she touched on the relative strengths of the 3 models of PPSR projects. Citizen science projects can be divided into 3 categories (see the 2009 CAISE report): contributory (generally designed by scientists, and participants collect data), collaborative (also designed by scientists, but participants may be involved in project design, data analysis, or communicating results), and co-created (designed by scientists and participants, and some participants are involved in all steps of the scientific process). I found this part fascinating, because I think learning from the strengths of all 3 models can make any program more successful. And of course, learning about different citizen science projects during the poster sessions was really exciting! Below are a few of my favorites.

PolarTREC- K-12 teachers go on a 2-6 week science research expedition in a polar region, and then share the experience with their classroom. I think this is really interesting because of the motivational aspect of kids participating in (and according to Sarah Crowley, even improving) authentic scientific research.

Port Townsend Marine Science Center Plastics Project– Volunteers sample beaches for micro-plastics around the US Salish Sea. I’ve heard a lot about this center, and the strength of their volunteer base is amazing.

Nature Research Center, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences– I really want to visit this museum! Visitors can engage in the scientific process on the museum floor, in one case by making observations on video feed from a field station.”

Conference talks, poster abstracts, and videos

Katie Woollven is in the Marine Resource Management program, focusing on Marine Education.

ed. note – apologies for the sporadic postings these last few days. Katie Stofer has been out of town, and things weren’t quite as well set up for other lab members to start posting themselves.

What I’ve learned this summer: Julie’s last post

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Pulling it all together and making sense of things proves one of the hardest tasks for Julie:

“I can’t believe this summer is about over.  I only have 3 days left at Hatfield.  Those 3 days will be filled with frantic work getting the rest of my exhibit proposal pulled together as well as my Sea Grant portfolio and presentation done for Friday.  I go home Saturday morning and I haven’t even figured out when I’m going to pack.  Eek.

But back to the point at hand.  Doing social science has been such a fun experience.  I really loved talking to people to get their feedback and opinions on Climate Change and the exhibit.  I’m so excited for this exhibit.  I want it to be fantastic and I’ve been working very hard on it.  I am stoked to visit next summer to see it in the flesh!

One thing that I find really challenging about doing this kind of research though, is pulling together the data and putting it into a readable format for something like my End of Summer Final Presentation on Friday!  The big survey I did, for instance, was 16 questions and the data collected is very qualitative and doesn’t fit neatly into a table on a power point slide.  So I have to determine which things to pull out to show and exactly how to do it.  I feel confident that I’ll get it down, it’s just going to perhaps rob me of some sleep the next couple days.

Today (Tuesday) I finally got to do something that I should’ve done long ago.  Mark took me into the “spy room” as some call it and showed me all the awesome video footage being recorded in the visitor center.  It’s really incredible!  I was able to download a few videos of myself interpreting at the touch tank which Mark suggested would be a good addition to my portfolio.  Now I feel like a real member of the Free Choice Learning crew.”

This summer has given me a wealth of experiences that will really benefit my future…I can’t wait to see what that future holds.

Busy week, weekend, month!

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Sorry I missed posting on Friday; I’ve been frantically trying to get ready for my two upcoming conferences, as well as collecting some data last-minute (yay) with some subjects that let’s just say treated scheduling a bit flexibly. My schedule of deadlines in this last week has been:

Aug 14 Geological Society of America abstract deadline – they have a session on eyetracking in the geoscience education section. Digital posters, which means we can show real eyetracking data. Good folks for me to meet in particular.

Aug 15 NARST 2013 proposal – I ended up skipping this; it will just be too much too close to when I’m trying to defend, plus I didn’t have a great proposal to go along with this year’s theme of inequality. Puerto Rico would have been awesome, though. I did get a proposal in in July for AERA instead, which is much closer to home in San Francisco, though even closer to my defense time!

Aug 15 final paper due for the International Science Communication Conference (JHC) – involved getting some friends to translate my abstract and keywords into French, of which I speak about 6 words, none of them “eyetracking.” Presentation was due in July.

Work on a presentation with Shawn and Laura for 6-ICOM; we have an hour and a half between us, but don’t know the audience very well, so we’re hoping our idea of about 45 minutes of presentation and 45 minutes of interactive discussion goes over with them. We’re apparently about the only research group looking at multimodal discourse in learning in museums, and science learning in particular, so we’re not sure how familiar the others will be with why we’re studying what we are, for one thing. However, we should be able to have a good discussion about methods and analysis. We’ll be using Prezi which will allow us to make a record of the discussion and then share it after the conference. Plus we edited it together, which went well except for a couple minor mishaps.

Collect two interviews, one with a subject that contacted me Thursday after having been away and I managed to squeeze the interview in on Friday, and the other with a subject that missed the first appointment.

Aug 20 (tomorrow) leave for Europe for three weeks for two conferences – 6-ICOM and JHC (plus a week of vacation in between in which I try to swing by a museum research group in Germany that’s using mobile eyetracking).

So it’s been a little crazy. I’ve been lining up more of our lab folks to post more regularly as well, so you’ll be hearing more about the variety of projects we’ve got going on.

However, stay tuned to our twitter feed @freechoicelab, as I/we will be doing my best to live tweet from both conferences. Live being 8 or 9 hours ahead of the U.S. West Coast, so maybe you won’t be awake when we are, but still.

From sketch to mock-up

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Summer Sea Grant Scholar Julie catches us up on her prototyping for the climate change exhibit:

“Would you like to take a survey?”  Yes, I have said that very phrase or a variation of it many times this week.  I have talked to more than 50 people and received some good feedback for my exhibit.  I also began working on my exhibit proposal and visuals to go along with it.  This is so fun!  I love that I get to create this, and my proposal will be used to pitch the plan to whatever company they get to make the exhibit program.  How sweet is that?

So, the plan is to have a big multi-touch table – here is what it looks like, from the ideum website:

 

You can’t see very well from that picture but people can grab photos or videos or other digital objects, resize and move them around and place them wherever they want using swipe, pinch, and other gestures as with tablets and multitouch smartphones.  It allows multiple users to surround the table as well and work together or independently. This is a video showing this table tested here at Hatfield- it has a lot of narration about Free Choice Learning, and you can see the table in action a little bit.

People will be able to learn about climate change and then create their own “story” about what they think is important about climate change or global warming.  My concept of the interface for this has gone through a metamorphosis.  Here are the various transformations the interface has gone through:

Stage 1: My initial messy drawing to get my thoughts on paper and make sure I was on the same page with the exhibit team.  At this point I thought we would just have a simple touch screen kiosk.

 

Stage 2: Mock-up made by Allison the graphic designer, using stage 1 as a guide.  I showed this to people as I interviewed them so they’d have an idea of what the heck I was talking about.

 

Stage 3: My own digital version I’m currently working on, now more in sync with the touch table.  The final version will go into my exhibit proposal.

 

Here’s what it looks like with a folder opened – upon touching a file, an animation would show the file opening and spilling the contents on the workspace to end up kind of like this:

 

This is a very exciting project to work on, and I’m glad to get to use and hone my skills in creativity, organization, and attention to detail.  This exhibit proposal will certainly need a lot of all 3 of those things.  It’s also very interesting to interview people- I find my preconceptions dashed often, which is very refreshing.  And it’s great to be able to tailor the exhibit to several different audiences, in hopes that the message will be well received by all, no matter where they currently stand in relation to the issue of climate change/ global warming.  Talking with folks helps me know for sure what kind of material each group wants, so I can maximize the success of the exhibit with that group.  I can’t wait to see this thing in the flesh – I have already decided I will have to take a vacation out here next summer just to check it out!

Freaky Friday? Or, more fun with cameras!

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We started the day with a couple of near-disasters but managed to make some good progress despite. We lost control of a hose while filling the tsunami wave tank and doused one of the controlling computers. Luckily, it was off at the time, but it also shouldn’t have had its case open, and we also should have been more aware of the hose! Ah, live and learn. No visitors were harmed, either.

It did help us identify that our internet is not quite up-to-snuff for the camera system; we’re supposed to have four GB ethernet connections but right now only have one. We went to review the footage to see what happened with the tanks, but the camera that had the right angle completely blanked out during just the time of the accident! Several of the other cameras are losing connection with the server intermittently as well. We’re not at the point of collecting real data, though, so again it’s just part of the learning process.

We also got more cameras installed, so we’re up to almost 30 in operation now. Not all are in their final place, but we’re getting more and more closer and closer as we live with them for a while and see how people interact. We also got the iPad interface set up so we can look at the cameras remotely using the Milestone XProtect app:

 

This will allow us to access the video footage from almost anywhere. It runs amazingly smoothly even on OSU’s finicky wireless network, and even seems to have slightly better image quality than the monitors (or maybe just better than my old laptop).

It’s a pretty powerful app, too, allowing us to choose the time we want to jump to, show picture in picture of the live feed, speed up or slow down playback, and capture snapshots we can email or save to the iPad Photo Library. Laura will install the full remote-viewing software on her laptop, too, to test that part of the operation out. That’s the one downside so far; most of our lab runs on Macs, while the Milestone system and the eyetracker are both on PCs, so we’ll have to buy a couple more laptops. Where’s that credit card?