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The Internet And Informal Science Education

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Emerging technology and museums

Museums often suffer from an inferiority complex on the subject media and technology. Museums, especially science museums, feel angst about their ability to deliver cutting-edge examples of science and technology. Despite the use of everything from augmented reality to flickr, museums feel concerned that their audiences demand the newest devices and interfaces. This concern underestimates the thinking[1] and the projects done to date in the museum field. Perpetually concerned about being behind the curve, they take for granted both the advances they have made and their role at the intersection of change. While the tensions between media and museums are worth exploring in depth in another place, this stub will begin to explore some of the potential applications and their intersection with museum needs.

Media plays an enormous role in shaping, extending and reinforcing learning. There are a number of developments within the new media arena that have potential for intensifying, extending and enriching museum science learning, including alternative interfaces and devices such as phones, augmented reality and virtual humans. The expansion of concepts such as citizen science and user viewpoints into the larger world (crowd-sourcing and tagging) shows potential for better solutions to the challenges of collections and contextualization.

Alternative interfaces: Phones

One of the more obvious developments in media today is the transformation of the phone into a true portable computing device. While the smartphone has until recently been the province of the business user, the explosion of other uses, both social and learning-based is just beginning to build, both here and internationally.[2] Multiple museum based projects have attempted to move the phone from an alternative hardware device for an audio tour[3] to a personal technology jackknife, making use of the convergence of applications to allow us to interact with museums and other learning environments in different ways.[4]

One emerging potential for the use of phones, especially for extending and reinforcing museum experiences, is the flourishing development of apps. While the market share for iPhones is fairly low, the integration of the apps and apps store concept is likely to carry over into other phones. Small widgets and apps have been around for years on Palm and other smartphones, but Apple's enforced data plan and on-the-spot, central delivery through iTunes has created an environment where the barriers to downloading a new app are very small. Most competitors do not have a clear innovative path, and are instead building on the apps store.[5] While apps still have a way to go in increasing their stickiness[6], the potential for informal learning experiences is enormous. Currently most "educational" apps are drill-based, but perhaps the best route for informal learning experiences is to avoid the "educational" tag, as Monterey Bay's Seafood Watch program did. The highly successful wallet guide for sustainable seafood is now an iPhone app with a corresponding Sushi Guide, and far more useful.[7] Other apps available for the iPhone cross the boundaries between gaming and mobile computing, such as the evolution-based game Spore.

File:monterreyaquarium.jpg

Monterrey Aquarium's Seafood Watch on iPhone

Another long-awaited development is the release of nature field guides for the phone. Though envisioned by many (the Encyclopedia of Life project[8] now in its first stages of user-contribution via iPhone[9]) the first full field guide apps, such as Peterson's and iBird are now available. While these field guides mostly extend printed material by combining traditional guides with audio and mapping, one can envision the convergence of eBird and iBird in the near future, allowing a greater connection between prior data and the moment in the field for citizen scientists.[10]


Mixed and Augmented Reality and Virtual Humans

There have been multiple projects in museums to allow the user to develop hands-on interaction experiences with abstract components. In the CONNECT project, four European Science Centers, together with a consortium of other institutions, developed an augmented reality headset system that would allow visitors to "see" abstractions such as the change in thrust and lift of an airplane wing foil as the visitor manipulated it. This ability for the visitors to "see" how their changes to the airplane wing impacted the forces on the plane allows for an "aha" hands-on moment with a haptic interface.

This notion of mixed and augmented reality is being taken further in the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale, in the Water's Journey to the Everglades exhibit being developed in collaboration with the Media Convergence Lab at the University of Central Florida. In addition to experiencing live everglades animals, visitors will be able to move backwards and forwards in time through the Everglades, making environmental choices and seeing how those choices change the ecosystem dynamic.[11]

The Museum of Science in Boston, in collaboration with the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California, is developing a virtual human to serve as interpretative guides and learning facilitators for visitors.[12] While still in early development for the museum setting, ICT and MOS will be applying lessons learned from the development of Sergeant Starr and other military-based virtual humans. All three of these exhibit interfaces are designed to allow visitors have real experiences while transcending prior boundaries, to create a richer exhibition experiences.

Collections and Content Managers

Perhaps, in thinking of citizen science and other key informal learning developments, it is actually informal learning which precedes some of the developments in the media and technology field. For example, crowd-sourcing data collection was being facilitated by water quality volunteers long before web 2.0 applications were developed. While the production of data by citizen scientists is as still critical as ever, attention in the museum field and in the wider media world has turned to dealing with the issues of 1) access to data and collections, 2) coding of data and content, and 3) the interface.

Access is to collections and information online is still a significant problem. Art museums have spent millions and years working on digitizing their collections while science and natural history museums are much less likely to have put significant effort into collections digitization. (They have spent far more energy on developing new modes of interaction.) The Smithsonian contains over 135 million objects, nearly 126 million of them in their natural history collections, and yet there are scarcely any significant collections presence online. Michael Edson, in his proposition for the Smithsonian Commons, outlines the challenges and advocates the benefits of moving the content into the public sphere.[13] Yet the task of "simply" digitizing millions of objects is herculean. Major science content projects such as Encyclopedia of Life have begun this work, yet at the moment they rely mostly on the aggregation of previously developed content rather than the creation of content (or documentation of collections).

David Weinberger, in his book Everything is Miscellaneous uses the example of the Bettmann Archives to describe how individuals engage with the photographs is limited by the contextualization that curators have already imposed. Weinberger argues that the digital age means we are no longer as limited to the cataloging categorizations we have had in the past. The museum community has been aware of this problem for years, and over time has tried multiple methods of adding context to the works. When the National Museum of the American Indian opened in New York in 1994, a significant number of objects had multiple labels from multiple viewpoints--from the user of the object to the curator and the artist. Moving onto the web, many of the early online design-your-own-collection interactives were partially conceived of as a place where users could impose their own meaning on a disparate group of objects. In 2006, the Steve Project,[14] a collaboration of the New Media Consortium and a variety of major art museums, discussed how visitors and curators tag the same works of art in fundamentally different ways.

In the recent gathering of media and museums at Smithsonian 2.0[15], major technology writers such as Clay Shirky emphasized the need for the Smithsonian to throw open their collections. Yet throwing open the collections may provide information, but not the key element that visitors need from museums-meaning. The Smithsonian Natural History Museum doesn't just have vast collections- it has great expertise in over 180 research scientists to help us understand and make meaning out of those collections. When a jet plane crashes down due to a flock of birds, it isn't just the artifacts we want access to, it's the experts.[16] While crowd-sourcing the tagging provides the community with a richer set of terms, we still require expertise to help visitors contextualize the content. An evolving marriage of user-generated content and expertise is required.

We also need new interfaces for these collections. Museums have experimented with a variety of search/browse interfaces over the years in a attempt to allow visitors to better explore and understand the collections from 2001 and the Experience Museum Project digital collection[17] to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's new Explore Modern Art ArtScope.[18] Mirroring the continual evolution in search options, museums continue to experiment with new ways to allow browsers to have richer exploratory experiences, similar to a physical museum experience in intention, but very different from the first attempts at museum online experiences.[19]

Multiple other developments in both technology and museums contribute to the current changes and offer partial solutions to long-term issues in the museum learning field. (For instance, I have not yet covered the emerging applications of geo-location from Cultural Orienteering and Situated Meaning-Making papers to Google Earth layers, or blogging by professionals[20], teens in museum programs[21], or scientists[22])

References

  1. ↑ See Din, H. and P.Hecht, (2007). The Digital Museum: A Think Guide, American Association of Museums, Washington, DC., the archives at http://conference.archimuse.com/researchForum/, Marty, P.F. & Jones, K.B. (Eds). (2008). Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums. New York: Routledge; Subramaniam, R. and L. Hin, (2005) E-learning and the Virtual Science Center, Idea Press, Hershey, PA. along with the Museum 3.0 ning site, and blogs Museum 2.0 and fresh + newer.
  2. ↑ Simonite, Tom (2009.) Innovation: The Cellphone Economy. New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16515-innovation-the-cellphone-economy.html
  3. ↑ Nickerson, M. (2005). 1-800-FOR-TOUR: Delivering Automated Audio Information through Patron's Cell Phones. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2005: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 31, 2005 at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/nickerson/nickerson.html
  4. ↑ Haley Goldman, K., Cell Phones and Exhibitions 2.O: Moving beyond the Pilot Stage, in J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 1, 2007 at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/haleyGoldman/haleyGoldman.html
  5. ↑ http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/03/palm-disowns-sm.html other cite here
  6. ↑ http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/study-most-free.html
  7. ↑ http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_iPhone.aspx
  8. ↑ www.eol.org and video demonstration on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NwfGA4cxJQ
  9. ↑ EOL photo uploader on iTunes
  10. ↑ http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/iphones-with-gp.html
  11. ↑ http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0638977
  12. ↑ http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0813541 and http://ict.usc.edu/projects/virtual_humans
  13. ↑ http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/1232008-gilbane-conference-smithsonian-commons-for-external-presentation
  14. ↑ http://steve.museum/
  15. ↑ http://smithsonian20.si.edu/
  16. ↑ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Fighting-the-Perils-of-Bird-Plane-Collisions.html
  17. ↑ http://www.archimuse.com/mw2001/papers/andolsek/andolsek.html
  18. ↑ http://www.sfmoma.org/projects/artscope/
  19. ↑ Thomas, S. and A. Mintz (1998) The Virtual and the Real: Media in the Museum American Association of Museums. Chapter on Ocean Planet.
  20. ↑ http://www.smm.org/blogs/
  21. ↑ http://www.youthexploringscience.com/
  22. ↑ http://www.smm.org/buzz/

The original draft of this article was written by Kate Haley-Goldman, Senior Research Associate and Media Specialist, Institute for Learning Innovation

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