The Future of Informal Science Education
From Media and Informal Science Learning
It is, of course, difficult to make predictions of any kind about the future, let alone about something as highly specific as informal science education. It's also the case that too often we look for and jump to the 'next big thing' (often with implementations that are shallow at best) when there are still much deep, rich work opportunities remaining to be achieved in the media and technologies we already have available. In fact, this is particularly true of the burst of new media forms that have emerged in the last decade or two, which makes the mere inevitable 'maturation' of these forms (much) more a cause for excitement than the mournful rite of passage maturation of an industry usually signifies.
With these caveats in mind, what we've attempted to do below is make some predictions about media and technology, largely leaving open for discussion and addition the potential impacts of these changes on science education. We've also included some background for the benefit of eventual readers who may not be as familiar with the subject as others. Some sections are more fleshed out than others, too; in general, our smaller observations are more fully detailed. More generally, we expect to add more sections/mega-trends and hope that our community of contributors will have ideas on what those sections should be. We've also definitely taken a point of view in many cases, in hopes that it will inspire--or incense--others with more specific knowledge to add to and round out our perspective.
To get the entire article on The Future of Informal Science Education in one continuous read as it was delivered at the March 11-12, 2009 kick-off conference, click here: The Future of ISE--Full Article.
Contents |
The Impact of Media on Science Itself
Main article: The Future of ISE--The Impact of Media on Science Itself
A basic fact of the media landscape is that media consumption continues to increase for virtually every demographic around the world.[1] Most of this article is focused on trends in media and technology that could impact science education, but in our research, we've also been struck by the many ways in which media now seems to be influencing the practice of science itself. For some fields, like ornithology, new media has helped greatly enhance an already long and rich tradition of citizen science. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology stands at the apex of lay participation in generating real scientific data and research, and programs like Project Feederwatch, eBird, The Great Backyard Bird Count, NestCams, the House Finch Disease Survey, and many more can serve as models for other disciplines. New technologies such as flip camcorders and cell phone applications are rapidly expanding the scope of what citizen scientists can achieve. Beyond this, citizen science seems to be moving, as it were, from animal model to human trials in a variety of ways.
And in some respects, citizen science is the proverbial 'tip of the iceberg' where the impact of media on scientific practice is concerned, some influences positive, others perhaps not so--ranging from media's impact on what gets researched and published to the use of video journals to surface tacit knowledge to innovations in peer review that bleed into new forms and levels of collaboration--with significant costs, according to at least some authoritative voices.
Convergence
Main article: The Future of ISE--Convergence
For the last twenty years, convergence has been a Holy Grail of media and technology, and there are a number of important ways in which we can predict it will come to fruition, though not necessarily in the same ways many originally expected, which should give us some pause in projecting.
Some ways that convergence has not been realized, at least not yet, include:
- The expectation that media in general, and the Internet in particular, would consolidate to a handful of providers, like the auto industry did in the early 20th century.
- Convergence of devices: by now, we were supposed to be down to one wireless device with all the functions of a PDA, phone, web browser, email/IM, MP3 player, camera, portable game player and more, while televisions and computers were also supposed to have merged into a single functional unit.
But there are other ways in which convergence has been happening and continues to happen in interesting ways, including:
- Convergence of media function, in which one form or format of media merges with another.
- Convergence of the real and virtual worlds
- Convergence of humans with machines
Abstraction
Main article: The Future of ISE--Abstraction
The relentless growth in the quantity and availability of information is leading or will lead to another trend with many manifestations, namely greater and greater tendencies or trends towards abstraction versus concrete one to one correspondence with the physical world. Some of the most prominent mechanisms by which abstraction is increasingly occurring (or predicted to occur) through media include:
- Short-form communication--i.e. the movement from postal mail (and phone conversations) to email to IM, text message, and Twitter.
- Multi-tasking and hyperlinking.
- Sensory diffraction--as the physical world becomes increasingly tagged with virtual information.
- Metaphor and mapping--mechanisms for dealing with information that seem likely to become increasingly important (even more than they already are).
- 'Post-modern' games--a predicted return to abstract essentials or ideals as the hyper-realistic, hyper-detailed 'Renaissance' era of games runs its course.
- 'Out there' differentiation--because the ecology of new media distribution inherently rewards concepts that push the proverbial envelope.
Each of these trends holds great creative promise, but many also contain the seeds of potentially negative consequences for scientific thought, education, and understanding (e.g. sensory diffraction potentially puts observation at risk, metaphors are both powerful and imprecise, etc.).
Maturation
Main article: The Future of ISE--Maturation
In typical business parlance, maturation signifies a market's approach to senescence and ossification. But in an environment-technology--in which price, performance, capacity, and bandwidth double every year (or halve in the case of price) and have been doing so for years (with a number of successors to Moore's Law already in the offing[2]), and in which paradigm shifts have arguably been happening on a logarithmic scale for an even longer time period,[3] maturation in media and technology refers more to a relentless "growing up" that must be taken into account in any analysis of what the future might hold for science education.
Besides relentless change, which makes it difficult to forecast individual long-term winners--history tells us that no matter how dominant a technology company appears to be, there's a good chance it will be displaced sooner than most expected--there are some trends (some we'll start with, others we hope will be added) in addition to those already mentioned that we will be part of the maturation process as it impacts informal science education. They include:
- People-powered search--a plethora of companies have come to the realization that algorithms alone will never be able to keep up with the Web's twists and turns, a re-set that could represent or point to an overall (and lasting) balance between man and machine.
- Authoring 2.0 -- user-publishers will seek to upgrade their authoring activities to increasingly professional levels through better (often specialized) tools and content, in many cases provided by the top-down experts who led Web 1.0 (an example of how Web 3.0 will be a synthesis of the first two waves).
- Collaboration 2.0 -- getting beyond collections of individuals called online communities (or social networks), tools and services will finally be developed to enable the Web to fully live up to its promise as a collaborative medium.
- Assessment-based communities -- assessment will be used in increasingly sophisticated (and to at least some extent, increasingly entertaining/engaging) ways to help users find where they belong and what they should be doing in an ever expanding, complex new media world.
- New groups, new audiences online-- families online together, senior citizens, underserved US populations, the developing world (an especially big [multi-]cultural wave), etc.
The Elephants in the Room?
Now, more than any time in recent history, it seems naïve to talk about the future of anything in a socioeconomic vacuum. Can we really project what will happen to media without taking into account a global economic crisis that could be protracted, looming shortages of raw materials like energy that media and technology depend on, serious environmental threats like global warming, a dysfunctional formal education system, and record levels of inequality within and between nations that could result in substantial social disruptions in coming years?
In the shortest of runs, the current crises could actually be a spur to innovation as software developers, no longer chained to payoffs from the conventional wisdom have the opportunity (or are forced) to work on the innovative ideas they actually feel passionate about-certainly that was the case in tech's last dark period (2000-03).[4] And the venture and entrepreneurial communities have clearly already started to engage with some of our overarching problems, generating a dizzying array of new businesses that promise to deal with energy issues, for example, and reduce our carbon footprint along the way. In fact, tech optimists look at all our current issues as one blip in an inevitable line of progress that will ultimately make each of us virtually immortal and omnipotent.[5]
Short of that, it's possible we will be able to identify and prioritize solutions that have ripple effects on a variety of other issues. Renewable energy, for example, promises to impact not just our energy issues, but a variety of economic, environmental, national security, and health care issues as well. More prosaically, and closer to home, the resources devoted to the semantic Web (i.e. getting computers to be able to read and understand Web pages) might one day allow computers to read and grade essays and other creative work so that we can actually test students on what has traditionally differentiated products of our educational system-creativity and entrepreneurial initiative-instead of putting our educational system in service of a race to the bottom by 'teaching to the test.'
But we're leaving space here for site participants to tell us what external issues they feel could most impact the future of media and technology (presumably in a negative way), what impact they expect these issues to have and what, if any, steps are available for media and informal science practitioners to mitigate them, either directly or through our influence on others (such as policymakers) who might take these steps.
Participants please add and discuss external issues here.
References
The original draft of this article was written by Tom de Boor, Principal Analyst, Grunwald Associates. To get the entire article as it was delivered in one continuous read, click here.
