research « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

So last week I posted about the evaluation project underway at Portland Art Museum (PAM) and wanted to give a few more details about how we are using the looxcie cameras.

Source: looxcie.com via Free-Choice on Pinterest

Looxcies are basically bluetooth headsets, just like the ones regularly seen used with cell phones, but with a built in camera. I am currently using them as part of my research emcompassing docent-visitor interactions, and decided to use them as a data collection tool because of their ability to generate a good quality “visitor-eye-view” of the museum experience. I personally feel their potential as a research/evaluation tool in informal settings are endless, and had some wonderful conversations with other education professionals at the National Marine Educators Association conference in Anchorage, AK recently about where some other possibilities could lie – including as part of professional development practice for educators and exhibit development.

At PAM, the looxices will be used to capture that view when visitors interact with exhibition pieces, specifically those related to their Museum Stories and Conversation About Art video-based programs. Here, fitting visitors with looxcies will enable us to capture the interactions and conversations visitors have about the art on display as they visit the museum. The video data gained here can then be analyzed for repeating themes around what and how visitors talk about art in the museum setting.

During our meeting with Jess Park and Ally Schultz at PAM, we created some test footage to help with training other museum staff for the evaluation procedures. In the clip below, Jess and Ally are looking at and discussing some sculpture pieces, and were both wearing looxcies to give them a sense of how they feel to the user. This particular clip is from Ally’s perspective, and you’ll notice even Shawn and I have a go a butting in and talking about art with them!

What’s exciting about working with the looxcies, and with video observations in general, is how much detail you can capture about the visitor experience, down to what they are specifically looking at, how long they look at it, and even if they nod their head in agreement with the person they are conversing with. Multimodal discourse eat your heart out!

Thursday, I had scheduled 3 faculty interviews, including two back-to-back. I do not recommend this approach, not the least of which reason is that the first of the back-to-back ran longer than most, and I barely had time to write analytical notes to collect my thoughts before I had to make sure everything was ready for the next subject. I also didn’t take time to go to stretch my legs and body after intensely concentrating on what to ask next. If I were really pressed, I probably could have begged a moment for the bathroom once the subject arrived and was reading over the consent form, but all in all, it probably took more out of me than was necessary or maybe even wise.

That said, I did make it through, probably because I’d spent so much time preparing before the first one so I didn’t goof up. I have a checklist of things to do before, during and after the interview, and all of my questions and even example probe questions for follow-up printed out as well. I have instructions for a task that I give them explained on a third sheet, and finally, background questions on a final paper. Most of these things I didn’t realize how much I needed until after or during my pilot interviews, another endorsement for trying out your interview strategy beforehand.

Some of my recommendatiions: make sure the blinds in the room are working. I discovered one really old set that was stuck halfway open, so I called maintenance. They haven’t been fixed yet, but at least they closed them so I don’t get glare on my screen for the images I’m showing. Close the window and door, and post a sign that you’re doing an experiment and what time you’ll be done. Of course, this doesn’t eliminate all the noise when there’s a large biology class across the hall with their doors open, but it helps a lot. Turn off your cell phone, and remind subjects to do the same. Even though it was on my list, I still forgot once yesterday and got distracted. Check the temperature of the room. Even if you don’t get sun glare, or need to worry about it, the blinds can help keep the room cool when you get intense afternoon sun. Of course, then you have to balance this with the room getting stuffy from being so closed up, again a reason that it would be nice to have some time between interviews to air things out if necessary.

Just a few short updates:

We now have a full 25 cameras in the front half of the Visitor’s Center, which gives us pretty great coverage of these areas. Both wide establishment shots and close-up interaction angles cover the touch tanks, wave tanks (still not quite fully open to the public) and a few freshwater creatures tanks that are more traditional tanks where visitors simply observe the animals.
Laura got a spiffy new EcoSmart pen that syncs audio with written notes taken on special (now printable from your printer) paper. She showed us how it translates into several languages, lets you play a piano after you’ve drawn the right pattern on the paper, and displays what you’ve written on its digital screen, performing pretty slick handwriting analysis in the process.
Katie ran the lab’s first two eyetracking experimental subjects yesterday, one expert and one novice pilot (not quite from the exact study population, but approximately). Not only did the system work (whew!), we’ve even got some interesting qualitative patterns that are different between the two. This is very promising, though of course we’ll have to dig into the quantitative statistics and determine what, if any, differences in dwell times are significant.

Sometimes, it’s a lot of small steps, but altogether they make forward progress!

The pace of research often strikes me as wonky. This, I suppose, is true of a lot of fields: some days, you make a lot of progress, and some days very little. A series of very small steps eventually (you hope) lead to a conclusion worthy of sharing with your peers and advancing the field. That means a lot of days of working in the trees without being able to see the forest.

Conferences, with their presentation application deadlines, have a funny way of driving research. I applied for the International Conference on Science Communication back in March and outlined all this data I figured I’d have for my thesis by the time the conference rolls around in the first week of September. Amazingly, I’m on track to have a fairly good amount of data, despite delays due to subject recruitment and IRB approval that I’ve talked about before.

However, now I have another twist in the process. Usually, one can work on the conference presentation almost up until the very moment of the presentation, especially if you get to host the presentation slides on your own laptop. This conference, though, requires me to have my final presentation almost 7 weeks before the actual presentation date. I can only assume this is because the conference, to be held in Nancy, France, is going to be held concurrently in both French and English, and thus, the organizers need this time to be able to translate my slides into French (of which I speak not a word).

In any case, this throws a major wrench into my planned schedule! I am doing fine with the pace, and have about half of my needed faculty interviews arranged (with 25% actually completed!). This deadline this week throws me into a strange dilemma of how to present something interesting, especially the visual data from eyetracking experiments, without actually being able to show them at the conference, as far as I can tell. I figure I will have some results from my actual subjects by the time of the conference, but I don’t know which subjects I will want to choose for that part until all of the interviews have been completed. So my solution will be to run a couple of pilot subjects on just the eyetracking part, without the interview. I’ve recruited one of the folks that works closely with us to be more of an “expert” user, and a member of the science and math teacher licensure master’s program to serve as a “novice.” I’m really excited by what the interviews have revealed so far and am hopeful that the eyetracking pilots will go as well. Crossing my fingers that this will be interesting to the conference attendees, too, with whatever verbal updates I can provide to accompany my slides in September.

Normally, once the majority of undergrads have finished their third term finals and graduation is a teary memory, there is a calm that overcomes campus that those of us here year-round have come to expect. Don’t get me wrong, the undergrads are the reason for this institution, but there are an awful lot of them (and more each year).

However, this year, I’m in a bit of a pickle. My study is specifically trying to target the general adult public, that is, those with a high-school degrees but maybe not a lot of undergraduate experience. At Hatfield, we generally have a slightly higher-educated population than I need. Also, my experiment takes an hour, so the casual visitor is unlikely to break from their group for that long. And my local campus population, at least my local congregation of said population, has just skedaddled for the summer.

So I’m busy trying to find anywhere those remaining might be: the very few residence halls that remain open (which also requires navigating some tricky flier-posting rules), the occasionally-open dining halls, lecture halls which might still have classes and bulletin boards nearby and the library, MU, and some local eateries. I’m also heading to the community college where many students are cross-registered and where they might be knocking out some core courses during the summer on the cheap(er). Hm, maybe I should post a flier at the local store where my incentive gift cards are from? In truth, this is really still just a convenience sample, as I am not plastering fliers all over Corvallis, let alone anywhere else in the state or country. At least, not at this point …

Any ideas welcome! Where do you go to find your research subjects?

I’ve started trying to recruit subjects, including first-year undergraduates and oceanography faculty, for my dissertation work. And it’s a slooooow process, partly due to poor timing, partly due to everyone being busy.

It’s poor timing because it’s finals week here at OSU. Not only are students consumed (rightly) by those end-of-term tests, it’s finals right before summer break. So on top of everything, people are scattering to the four winds, frantically moving out of apartments, and scrambling to start summer jobs or summer classes. So, I’m being patient and trying to think creatively about recruiting a fairly broad, random sample of folks. So far I’m posting flyers in classroom buildings and dining and residence halls, but my next step may be standing in front of the library or student union with all the folks trying to get initiatives on the ballot for November.

The faculty are another story, of course. I can easily get contact information and even fairly detailed information about their experience with visualizations. However, they are also quickly scattering for summer research cruises – two I called just today are leaving early next week for 10 days to 3 weeks. Luckily, I got them to agree to participate when they get back. I’m still getting several brush offs of “too busy.” So my tactic to fight back here is to find other professors they know who can make me less of a ‘generic’ grad student and thus somewhat harder to say no to.

All in all, it’s rejection the same as in exhibit evaluation, just with different excuses.

Stay tuned!

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

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Using the Looxies at PAM

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