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

It is official, I have been in graduate school too long. It has started to change the way I think about the world!

Last night, I was at a local Science Pub event. This in and of itself, might trigger the “nerd” label for some people, but as a fairly educated person before starting this PhD, and living in a liberal, college town, lots of types of people attend these events now. Science Pubs are almost trendy these days. Our local one is often standing room only, and takes place in a venue that is used frequently for concerts, fund-raisers and shows of all kinds. Even the name of the venue is cool- Cozmic Pizza- you can have pizza and a beer and listen to smart people talk. Not a bad way to spend an weekday evening. Also, the topic was not even that fringe- “You Are What You Eat: The Evolutionary Importance of Diet in Mammals”. The talk was given by a local professor, Dr. Samantha Hopkins, who is in the Geology Department at the University of Oregon. While her work is often in paleontology, she is a self-described “mammal geek” and her talk was peppered with lots of funny anecdotes and plenty of cute photos of mammals (none of which my partner would agree to let me get as a pet… sigh…)

All of this was a pleasant experience. I learned a few things, laughed a few times, and enjoyed a glass of Kombucha. However, it was during the question and answer phase that the wheels in my head started spinning. While gender issues in science are not a particular area of study for me, it does come up in my department on a fairly regular basis, and both my daughters are just starting to explore gender issues through courses in their own college experience, so it is on my radar. Yet, it took me a bit to realize, “hmm… so far, all of the people who have asked questions are guys” and I thought, “I am going to pay attention to this and see if it continues.” It is probably no big surprise to anyone that it did continue. Out of around 12 questions (I didn’t start counting until I had my observation, so I had to make a best guess about the total number), only 2 were asked by women, much later in the Q & A session. To make matters even sadder, one of the women qualified her question by stating “this is probably a dumb question” as she asked it. So, I did a scan of the room, and while I did not do a full head count, it seemed that pretty close to 50% of the audience was female. Furthermore, this was a completely free-choice experience, in a social setting, with alcohol available to loosen social inhibitions, and the topic was even more focused on biology- an area females typically express a slightly higher interest in than males.

While I may have previously made an observation like this, and possibly gone on a slight feminist rant about it, what was truly surprising to me was my next thought. Where my mind went next was “it would be pretty easy to design a research project to explore this more in depth.” We could have people do gender counts when people walk in the door and then keep track of how many questions were asked by each (notice I am also consciously using gender as opposed to sex, as we could only make a best guess by appearances, without doing a more involved study- grad school is teaching me so much about so many things!). We could compare this data across different locations, different topics of Science Pubs, we could try to look at different age groups- there are all kinds of interesting questions to explore! And the fact that I now think of more explicit ways to explore them, instead of just a curious observation, was a sign to me that I just might have been in grad school too long.

PS- and the next sign was that my first thought about it this morning was, “and I could write a Blog post about it”!

Last week (Feb 26 – March 1) the 8^th Annual ScienceOnline Together Conference took place in North Carolina. Thanks to the support of TERRA Research Magazine and OSU’s Environmental Health Sciences Center, a watch party was held on the OSU campus allowing for virtual attendance and participation (no need to wait in a TSA screening line!). The focus of the conference was to explore how the World Wide Web is changing the way science is shared, communicated, and interpreted. There were an incredible number of sessions of interest to science communicators that use a variety of web formats including outreach, blogging, and social media. Participants spanned scientists, students, journalists, and educators. A sampling of the session topics included: Communicating the Process of Science, Healthy Online Promotion, How Psych Research Can Inform Effective Communication, and The Role of Social Media in Science News Reporting. Tips, tricks, insights, stories, best practices – all were shared in efforts of helping others build new skills and effectively communicate their research or science program on the web. As the conference progressed, there was a flurry of activity on Twitter. I believe at one point the conference was trending as people live-tweeted the sessions with #scio14 or #sciox. It was hard to keep up with everything coming in on TweetDeck!

My role with the watch party included support during the session on “Social Media as a Scientific Research Tool”. David Shiffman, graduate student and blogger for Southern Fried Science, led the discussion from Raleigh, and presented ways that social media could be used in research on topics such as disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and public policy. The discussion evolved into questions about ethics, privacy, and accurate interpretations of qualitative content. As someone studying social science and qualitative research methods, I appreciated hearing comments about the increased access to social media data (such as status updates or tweets on a particular topic) and presuming “expertise” in human behavior and perceptions based on brief content analysis. It was suggested that if you are trained in the natural or physical sciences, it is useful to collaborate with a social scientist to reach a more accurate interpretation.

It is great to these conversations are happening and to see a community that is eager to organize and push forward on the evolution of science communication. Watching these sessions made me reflect on the power of language and the theorists we reference in the Free-Choice Learning Lab. Frequently we cite the work of psychologist Vygotsky with regards to cognitive development coupled with social interaction and language as a semiotic tool. If he were alive today, I sure he would be interested in the science of science communication and how we as humans use social engagement and tools like social media as a method of increasing the numbers participating in discussion.

I’m looking forward to seeing how SciOnline Together Conference evolves for the 2015 session in Georgia.

I believe every graduate student needs a distraction. My most commonly used distraction is cooking. As I’ve previously posted, I love books and cookbooks are some of my favorite books to buy or receive as gifts. Cooking is a way for me to take my mind off of things because my attention needs to be on chopping, managing heat, and tasting (duh!).

I was recently inspired by a tweet posted by Bon Appetit magazine (@bonappetit). They posted a photo of a famous chef’s cookbook station and said “you can learn a lot about a chef by the cookbooks on their station”. I by no means want to degrade chefs by saying that I am one, but it got me thinking about what my shelf of cookbooks says about me.

A selection of my cookbooks

I have cookbooks I turn to all the time for the basic recipes that every cook needs in their arsenal. And I have other cookbooks that I proudly own, thinking one day I’ll have the time to cook the recipes in them. For instance, I love the entree recipes in Tartine Bread, but the bread recipes are just out of my range at the moment. Bread, to me, is something so down home and I love, love, love making it by hand. That’s probably why I have two bread books (and the pizza book that contains pizza dough and focaccia recipes). I think bread making is in our roots, our heritage. I use the same ingredients and techniques as my great grandmother. Bread doesn’t change with food trends, it doesn’t need to.

I think we all need to respect the forgotten skills of cooking (coincidentally the title of a great book by an Irish woman), but I do like following food trends. My husband often tells people that when I cook you don’t get a hamburger, you get a hamburger. Cooking new foods keeps things interesting in the kitchen.

Some of my favorite books on my shelf are ones published by Junior Leagues. Of course, I own Honest to Goodness from my hometown of Springfield, IL (also Abraham Lincoln’s hometown, hint the name of the book). Other Junior League publications I own include Peoria, IL, Chicago, St. Louis (specifically the Italian-American neighborhood called The Hill), and one from my favorite city, San Francisco.

When I told my mom about this blog post she asked me, “So what do your cookbooks say about you?” I laughed and replied, “That I like carbs.” She then proceeded to tell me hers represent “comfort.” Sadly, I couldn’t get a picture of my mom’s cookbook station in time for this post. I did tell my advisor, Dr. Shawn Rowe, about this post and he and Dr. Olga Rowe so kindly shared a photo of their cookbook shelf. I’ll have to follow up on what their cookbook shelf says about who they are.

Shawn and Olga’s cookbook shelf

So, what do your cookbooks say about you?

As I continue to explore the field of science communication, I have been thinking about HOW this information is communicated and what tools we use. As new technology becomes available, we have the opportunity to use different methods and promote our message with a wider audience. In my last post on Sharing Science through Social Media, I talked about how the research enterprise is discussing the use of social media. There is a learning curve on how to use these platforms effectively, but they give researchers a way to practice communicating their results with the public. A researcher can share interpretations of their data in a variety of formats including posters, presentations, and peer-reviewed publications, but there are additional ways to represent data visually beyond the bar chart.

One technique of combining complex data with graphics is an “infographic”. This format is not new, for example, weather forecasts are representations of atmospheric models in a simplified visual layout. Recently infographics have gained popularity online as a means of visualizing and sharing data on any number of topics and because it is easy to share them. David McCandless, a journalist and self-described data detective, provides one perspective on the beauty of data visualization in a TED talk. He describes infographics as a language that combines the visually appealing with the addition of concepts. He suggests that through the interpretation of a combination of relative data sets presented visually, perceptions and behaviors could be influenced. Companies such as Visual.ly or Piktochart allow users to explore uploaded infographics, add content, and connect with a community of designers, journalists, and developers. They have created templates for those that want to create infographics, but don’t have the background in programming or graphic design. Something to consider is the quality of the datasets. Piktochart will recommend sources while Visual.ly encourages viewers to think critically about what the infographic means and what bias the source may be presenting. This could spark an entirely new blog post on the significance of information literacy…

Living in a fast-paced world, we are flooded with incoming data on a daily basis. We have to find ways to consciously and subconsciously sort through what is relevant or interesting to us. This gets me thinking about the attractiveness of visual design and how we can each pick out different patterns from quantitative and qualitative data to tell different stories. Connecting this to free choice learning, if datasets were available for visitors to manipulate on a touch screen or through a different format at the Visitor Center, how would they be interpreted? What stories, infographics, or statements would people create from data provided by oceanographic expeditions or citizen science? How might they share their creations with others and does this generate discussion? Could this promote learning? As time progresses, we will only increase in the amount of data that we generate. What we do with all this data and how we share it will continue to evolve as the tools and technologies change too.

“Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what is right” – Isaac Asimov

Rachael Carlson’s Silent Spring drew attention to a sense of an environmental crisis in the 1960s. During the same decade, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, warning the world about population growth and its potential threats to planetary life. With the rising need for a basic change of values, a new field emerged as we can see in John Muir’s advocacy for “all things natural, wild and free”. Furthermore, Aldo Leopold advocated for a much needed land ethics in his Sandy County Almanac. However, Leopold himself could not provide a systematic ethical theory or framework in support of his ethical concerns and ideas, but nonetheless he created an opportunistic challenge for moral theorists.

Many environmental scientists and philosophers debate the need for a revolutionary environmental ethics to regulate the business of humankind with and within nature. Conservation, sustainable development, deep ecology, social ecology, feminism, bioregionalism are all examples of fields where ethics is, to various degrees, a concerning component and a goal. However, thinking about ethics and morality drives all dimensions of the human enterprise, not only what is concerned with environmental issues, and they do not fall short of the old relativism, which in a way gives room to prospectively built moral discourses.

The three major schools of thought on morality are, in a way, examples of such relativism: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. The later is fundamentally different from the first two in the sense that it is not worried about asking the question of “what is the right thing to do?” either because of the rules created (deontology) or because of perceived consequences (consequentialism); instead, it is concerned with the question of “how are we to live our lives?” At the end though, to think ethically is to think about what we do and why we do it, which has been fueled through many years of philosophical thoughts on morality and human nature. Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci put it quite precisely that, ultimately, it is still up to us to decide what to make of it all.

A few blogs ago it was brought up that if we really are to promote change, the business of informal education should no longer avoid issues such as religion and spirituality, issues that address the whole person within learners. Here too it is imperative to look at the philosophical thoughts on morality while making moral decisions or weaving a morality system of our own. A wholesome environmental or land ethics has not yet solidified because society has yet to find the congruent points into moral theories in the face of practicalities and effective ways to foster an environmental ethics based on these congruent points. But finding those points and building dialogues among them is one of the only ways to avoid the relativist fallacy that seems to create a continuous meaningless relationship between human and non-human nature.

Just as Lisa Roberts in her book From Knowledge to Narrative challenged museums to think of themselves less as stewards of culture and knowledge and more as forums for dialogues among multiple, sometimes competing narratives about events, objects, identities and ideas, it is interesting to think of environmental education in informal contexts as potential forums for moral dialogues about the relationships among human and non-human nature. This, of course, also requires some paradigm shift in informal education from fear to engage moral and ethical questions to finding ways to put them front and center.

In his 2012 book entitled “Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life”, scientist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci coin the term Sci-Phi to define a thinking practice with a crucial assumption that we must use both reason and evidence to guide and improve our lives. The book is about what philosophy and science together can inform us about the big questions of life, questions initially raised by Aristotle and other Ancient Greek philosophers.

Basically, Sci-Phi is short for “wisdom” and “practical advice” as he says. Science is not enough, and philosophy can and should be informed by the best science available, the same way that scientific knowledge should also be guided by our values. Going way back in time, the author quotes Kant who famously put that “experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play”. A practical example of that I talked about in a previous post is the question raised about the climate justice movement having the potential to blend environmentalist and social justice movements together, in a Sci-Phi way to address the scientific issue and the axiological issue we are faced with climate change.

The discourse Massimo is raising is by no means new. Kant himself started to articulate that thought is the give and take between sensibility and understanding. The world exists but so does the works of the mind. A version of academic neo-kantianism is concerned with blending new findings in science with the study of philosophy. Two aspects of such played an important role in our “old friend” Bakhtin’s early work as well: 1) The desire to relate traditional problems of philosophy to discoveries in the exact sciences. 2) The emphasis on unit and oneness as he tried to get to the world, the other side of Kant’s ideas, rather than the mind. His emphasis was in the “process”, the need to take others and otherness into account and emphasis on plurality and variety.

As I have been reading on Bakhtin’s work (Shawn correct me if I am wrong), there is this problematic notion of selfhood. We only exist in dialogue, because there is an otherness out there. Hence, there is a radical emphasis on Bakhtin’s work in regards to particularities and situatedeness. On this token, one can argue that Philosophy and Science were once united under the umbrella of “natural philosophy”, but because of changes in particularities and situations in its advancement, there is now a clear otherness between the two, perhaps an otherness that already existed in the “selfhood”of natural philosophy, but that needed to break apart in order for voices to be heard.

Going on another important tangent, the question of selfhood is a question of location. In this sense, what voice is really talking when we talk? Utterance raises a question of authorship, so in a narrative there is always co-authorship among voices, being that everyday speech or complex literary work. At first sight, one may say science fits within the complex text realm and philosophy fits within everyday life concerns, but I would think they truly co-exist and co-author all dimensions of life.

So I got to think, is our informal learning research the very exercise of give and take in the co-authorship? Do we try to make sense of this co-constructed dialogism among participants during an “every day “ experience that constitute a museum visit, being ourselves part of such co-construction of a narrative situated in time and space? Then, when we retell those stories through our thesis, that still consists of a co-constructed dialogism in the shape of a “complex literary work”. In publication, we are named as authors of our own thesis but we are just one of the voices speaking at the moment of writing, while other voices are not silenced only reframed within our situated words. In this sense, we are authors of nothing but the mere mechanical materialization of words in a page, words of a self AND an otherness in a situated time and space.

So, are our theses about science or are they about philosophy? Are we practicing Sci-Phi? I think we are, and I think it is about time that becomes explicit and accepted as a meaningful practice and, why not, a co-constructed way of knowing.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

You know you’ve been in grad school too long when…

Science + Communication on the Web = An Evolving Discussion

Chew on This

Power by Design: Translating Complex Data into a Visual Story

Museums as stages for moral discourse

What Our Theses Are Really About?

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