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

Rejection. It’s an inevitable part of recruiting human subjects to fill out your survey or try out your exhibit prototype. It’s also hard not to take it personally, but visitors have often paid to attend your venue today and may or may not be willing to sacrifice some of their leisure time to improve your exhibit.

[Full disclosure: this blog post is 745 words long and will take you approximately 5-10 minutes to read. You might get tired as you read it, or feel your eyes strain from reading on the computer screen, but we won’t inject you with any medications. You might learn something, but we can’t pay you.]

First, you have to decide beforehand which visitors you’re going to ask – is it every third visitor? What if they’re in a group? Which direction will they approach from? Then you have to get their attention. You’re standing there in your uniform, and they may not make eye contact, figuring you’re just there to answer questions. Sometimes rejection is as simple as a visitor not meeting your eye or not stopping when you greet them.

You don’t want to interrupt them while they’re looking at an exhibit, but they may turn and go a different direction before you get a chance to invite them to help you. How far do you chase them once you’ve identified them as your target group? What if they’re going to the restrooms, or leaving the museum from there? When I was asking people to complete surveys about our global data display exhibit, they were basically on their way out the door of the Visitor Center, and I was standing in their way.

If you get their attention, then you have to explain the study and not scare them off by making it sound like a test, with right or wrong answers, even when you have right and wrong answers. You also have to make sure that you don’t take too much of their time.

Then there are the visitors who leave in the middle of the experiment, deciding they didn’t know what they were getting into, or being drawn away by another group member.

Oh, you’re still there? This isn’t too long? It’s not lunchtime, planetarium show time or time to leave for the day? I’ll continue.

If you have an IRB or other informed consent document, this can be another hurdle. If you’re not careful about what you emphasize, visitors could focus on the “Risks” section that you must tell them about. In exhibit evaluation and research, this is often only fatigue or discomfort when someone feels they don’t know the right answer (despite assurances that no one is judging them). But of course, you have to be thorough and make sure they do understand the risks and benefits, who will see the information they give and how it will be used. Luckily, we don’t often need to collect personal information, even signatures, if we’re not using audio or video recording.

Then there is the problem of children. We want to assess the visit with the true types of groups that we see, that is, mostly families or mixed adult-child groups. However, anyone under 18 needs to have consent given by a parent. Unfortunately, a grandparent, aunt, uncle, sister or brother doesn’t count, so you have to throw out those groups as well. Even if a parent is present, you have to make sure that you can explain the research to the youngest visitor you have permission to study (usually about 8 years old) and even worse, explain the assent process to him or her without scaring them off. As our IRB office puts it, consent is a process, a conversation, not just a form.

So who knows if we’re really truly getting a representative sample of our visitors? That’s definitely a question about sampling theory. Luckily for us at Hatfield, we’re working with our campus IRB office to try and create less-restrictive consent situations, as when we don’t have to get a signed consent form if that’s the only identifying information we ask visitors to provide. Maybe we’ll be able to craft a situation where over-18 family members will be able to provide consent for their younger relatives if a parent didn’t travel with them that day. Luckily, as this progresses, you’ll be able to follow it on our blog.

Wow, you’ve read this far? Thank you so much, and enjoy the rest of your visit.

Today, Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS) hosted the Salmon Bowl, our regional competition within the National Ocean Sciences Bowl. Some fellow grad students and I had the opportunity to try out a free-choice learning activity with the participants as part of a class project.

I really enjoyed seeing high school students engaged with ocean sciences. Many conservation issues don’t have easy answers. It’s nice to know the next generation of of scientists, voters, educators and citizens in general includes people who are eager to learn and willing to listen to others.

In the Lab, we’re still scrambling to get the website finished up. We’ve had a lot of great help (technical and emotional) from our colleagues on campus. Thanks, everybody. It’s getting there.

The FCL Lab website currently tops our list of priorities.

We’ve been struggling with it for months now, and our biggest obstacles have been the odd affordances and constraints of Drupal. Drupal is the content management system used by Oregon State University. It’s open-source and very adaptable.

These are good things.

It’s also user-hostile and often intolerably restrictive for users without certain administrative privileges.

These are bad things.

Very bad things.

It’s sort of like being handed an array of organic compounds and told to create a rhinoceros. Of course, you have to assemble your rhinoceros one cell at a time, creating each cell individually, organelle by organelle. You can’t just make a skin cell, copy it, then paste it all over the rhino. You see, this lack of a basic function allows you to make a rhino with all kinds of crazy skin, so it’s actually a “feature.” Aren’t you grateful?

Oh, and you can’t bond hydrogen to carbon yourself because your version of nature does not include that functionality. There’s an active community of creator deities out there who have found various workarounds, but these all require a level of sanctioned omnipotence that the universe has withheld from you as a matter of policy. You can finish at least the brain by the end of the week, right? After all, it’s just one thing!

Perhaps Drupal’s most beautiful moment so far came toward the beginning of our development process. We wanted to find out how to activate and work with modules, so we tried to consult the help documentation. Instead of the help page, we were greeted with a message telling us to install the “help” module, with no further explanation.

Fantastic.

Jasper Visser wrote up this brief list of five advantages Pinterest offers for audience engagement.

“Pinterest is the perfect platform for culture, if you ask me. It’s the platform most suited to give meaning to our mission statements and values.”

Pinterest is the “it” social medium right now. Do you think it will prove to be a lasting and effective method of talking to and with audiences?

If you haven’t seen the SETI Institute‘s “Earth Speaks” project, you might want to do so. You can log in to post or record a message you would like to send to an extraterrestrial intelligence, or submit your message via Twitter. The outcome of this has been a large collection of questions, dire predictions, jokes, Star Trek references and the to-be-expected indictments of humanity. Gary Stix of Scientific American recently posted some examples of the discourse, along with some commentary.

Can we gain something from this reflexive exercise? I’m intrigued by the frequent Othering of humanity in the messages. Many bemoan our species’ history of war and hatred, but this fixation on human flaws often apes the very misanthropy that it pretends to oppose. As of this posting, the words “peace” and “hello” dominate the message section’s rotatable tag cloud.

What do you want to say, and who do you think should hear it?

Day 2’s sessions ended up focusing on the Communication side of Education/Outreach/Scientific Workforce, and I think that framing it that way drew a bigger audience. One presentation on how to create a video was very similar to Ari Daniel Shapiro’s Education talk on producing radio programs or podcasts the day before, with how-to’s, but the audience was much bigger. Is it that “education” and “outreach” are scarier terms than “communicating”? If so, we educators need to think about how to make education more “do-able” for scientists if we want them to do the education to at least some extent, rather than leaving it all to education professionals.

We wonder, however, why education and communication are separated? Perhaps we have slightly different goals, but perhaps not: communication may have a specific outcome in mind, such as motivating people to think a certain way or do a certain thing, where education might more broadly want learners to understand how science works.

One afternoon talk pointed out that between science and communication, at least, it depends on your audience. For example, scientists focus on what we don’t know, whereas policymakers need to know what science does know. So in communicating and educating, we have to decide whether we’re trying to convey what science is and how it works, or whether we’re trying to convey where science is at the moment.

Throughout the week COSEE is hosting a series on how to do education/communication of your science. These lunch workshops that have had about 100 participants, or roughly 2 percent of the conference attendees. Again, by a show of hands on Tuesday, many of those, however, were graduate students.

Last night there was a panel discussion on Bridging the Cultural Gap between Scientists and the Public. I overheard one scientist at the COSEE exhibitor booth pooh-pooh the need for him to attend the panel, as he basically said he knew there was a gap but that it was the public’s problem. COSEE staff made a valiant effort to convince him that he was actually a vital part of bridging the gap, but regardless, there was still a relatively small audience for the program. However, attendees seemed to skew a little bit more toward the early- to mid-career scientists than the other education sessions (perhaps because the grad students had all run off to get beer). We had mixed feelings about the presentation because we walked away a bit more confused about what we could do. The researchers on communication and communicators on the panel offered us ideas about what the communication breakdown was, but we didn’t get a chance to discuss many practical ideas.

The basic premises were that it’s not a problem of literacy, but of people tending to affiliate with groups and basically only attend to information that those groups agree with, in order to maintain that affiliation. The other presentation highlighted peculiarities of the journalistic process that complicated the communication picture, such as editors who focus on minor details to up the drama factor and sell their products. So on the one hand, we need to remove the threat that holding a position on a subject would automatically mean you’d no longer be part of a group that’s important to you, that is, we have to change the “meaning” that accompanies the facts. How to do this, however, is what remains for us to figure out.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Rejection OR How I learned to stop worrying and love the research process

Salmon Bowl

Oh, the Drupality!

“5 things you could do with Pinterest” (From The Museum of the Future)

Oceans ’12 Day 3

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