There is a renewed interest amongst science communication practitioners and scholars to explore the potential of storytelling in public communication of science, including to understand how science storytelling functions (or could fail) in different contexts. Drawing from storytelling as the core theme of the 2018 conference of the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) Network, we present a selection of papers, essays and practice insights that offer diverse perspectives. Some contributions focus on the cultural and structural qualities of science stories and its key success
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marina JoubertLloyd DavisJenni Metcalfe
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings. The project will bring together science museum visitor experience developers, visitor studies staff, indoor location technology developers, cyber-learning researchers, and STEM informal learning specialists for a two day conference, COMPASS (Conference on Mobile Position Awareness Systems and Solutions), to address the achievements and potential of indoor location aware mobile (ILAM) technology in science museums. The pre-conference work, the conference itself, and a subsequent e-publication will provide multiple, informed perspectives and knowledge around ILAM for science museums to develop apps for visitors' own smartphones to enhance and personalize the visitor experience and to experiment with new kinds of inquiry-based learning. The goals of the conference are to form an integrated vision by consolidating expertise from disparate disciplines connected to ILAM tech development, to transform visitor mobile tools to provide more innovative forms of interaction and personalization, and to open new avenues for visitor research with automated data collection and analysis.
The COMPASS conference will bring together 80 participants for two days in September 2018 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA. The first dissemination will take place in a presentation at the ASTC conference the following month in October 2018. A webinar sharing insights from COMPASS and inviting others to engage will be held in March 2019 hosted by ASTC and accessible by ASTC members and non-members alike. A companion COMPASS e-publication will be released for free download, also in March 2019, with summaries of conference proceedings, key issues identified, case histories of ILAM in museums, white papers and other resources. Conference outcomes include establishing a community of practice or special interest group and establishing common goals for future collaborative work. By gathering a diverse range of perspectives and expertise to share research and evidence based findings, COMPASS include collective problem solving and an informed cross disciplinary approach to planning and implementing ILAM technology in the museum environment. The conference will explicitly address the benefits and quality of open source code and protocols and how techniques could be shared among institutions. As professional experience with deploying ILAM apps grows, this tool could be used to increase accessibility for diverse visitor populations, put in use at smaller and medium sized science centers, and applied to a variety of research studies, increasing the impact for funders and benefiting the science center community at large.
This is a conference review of the 2nd Commemoration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which had the theme Gender, Science and Sustainable Development: The Impact of Media. It was held in United Nations Headquarters, New York City, U.S.A., and a parallel event was held simultaneously in Valetta, Malta. There were 45 listed speakers from 24 countries, with a gender ratio of 2:1 in favour of women. The contribution of the media to socio-cultural barriers facing girls and women in STEM was well-illustrated. However, few actionable solutions were proposed.
This award supports a conference that will inform the design of "backbone" organizations for the NSF INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science) program. NORC at the University of Chicago (an independent research institution that delivers reliable data and rigorous analyses to guide programmatic and policy decisions) and TERC (a nonprofit education research and development organization based in Cambridge, MA, dedicated to improving STEM learning for all) collaborate on Envisioning Impact, a two-part in-person and virtual event that will inform the design of INCLUDES Alliance and National Network backbone organizations.
The objectives of the conference are to: (1) facilitate a shared vision of impact for INCLUDES broadening participation projects and program; (2) stimulate discourse on key elements of a shared measurement system for continuous improvement and outcome assessment; and (3) inform decisions on the infrastructure and priority services INCLUDES backbone organizations will provide to assist grantees (and others) in assessing progress towards collective impact. The conference will bring members of three communities together: PIs and evaluators of INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots; investigators and evaluators of other NSF-supported broadening participation alliances, extension projects, and other collective efforts to support inclusion and diversity in STEM; and members of prior and extant NSF-supported knowledge-networking, collaboratory, and resource network initiatives. Members of these communities will collaborate in two separate events: an in-person, 1.5 day conference, and a follow-on virtual Video Hall that will allow a larger number of participants to engage, over a one week period, in facilitated community discourse around short video narratives produced by each project.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kevin BrownSarah-Kathryn McDonaldJoni Falk
While the use of scientific visualisations (such as brain scans) in popular science communication has been extensively studied, we argue for the importance of popular images (as demonstrated in various talks at #POPSCI2015), including pictures of everyday scenes of social life or references to pictures widely circulating in popular cultural contexts. We suggest that these images can be characterised in terms of a rhetorical theory of argumentation as working towards the production of evidentiality on the one hand, and as aiming to link science to familiar visualities on the other; our example
The prevalent lack of research on the interrelations between science, research and popular culture led to the organization of the first International Conference on Science and Research in Popular Culture #POPSCI2015, which took place at Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt, Austria, from 17--18 September 2015. The aim of the conference was to bring together not only science communication researchers with an interest in popular culture, but also other scholars, scientists and researchers, artists, media professionals and members from the general public. In this issue of JCOM we present four
The largest meeting of science journalists took place this summer in Seoul, Korea. It bore the imprint of a few of the previous ones — as a gathering to build community and encourage beginners —, but also showed some marked changes from when it all started back in 1992, as told by some of the leading actors.
While some public works are monumental civil engineering structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Harbour Bridge, most are commonplace, even invisible, and they are taken for granted. The reason for existence of public works is to provide basic services, but both large and small infrastructure facilities also present opportunities to engage the public in understanding fundamental concepts of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). We review here lessons learned in the National Science Foundation-funded Golden Gate Bridge Outdoor Exhibition project. Using the title of
In the provision of networked services for museums, the term 'openness' crops up in a variety of contexts including open standards and open source software. In addition, the Web 2.0 environment has led to increased interest in open content and in the use of freely available networked applications which may be regarded as open services. This focus on openness for the developer or service provider can be complemented with a culture of openness which encourages the users to actively engage with services and generate their own content. It can be difficult to argue against the benefits which
The Science and Technology Museum from Catalunya (mNACTEC) has developed a virtual exhibition from the documents and objects used for the exhibition "Experimental Physics Laboratory of the Mentor Alsina". The main objective of the virtual exhibition is complementary to the current exhibition. Provide information, list of objects and operating proposal that could be difficult to develop in an exhibition in which dominates the environmental sense. The virtual exhibition offers information on all objects of the early twentieth century that form the collection of laboratory and interactive
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Joan MunozSantiago VallmitjanaJaume ValentinesStefano D'Argenio
To explore how the United States can harness the powerful features of digital games for learning, the Federation of American Scientists, the Entertainment Software Association, and the National Science Foundation convened a National Summit on Educational Games, on October 25, 2005 in Washington, DC. The Summit brought together nearly 100 experts to discuss ways to accelerate the development, commercialization, and deployment of new generation games for learning.
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Federation of American ScientistsHenry Kelly
New mobile device features and the growing proportion of visitors carrying mobiles allow the range of museum exhibit design possibilities to be expanded. In particular, we see opportunities for using mobiles to help exhibits scale up to support variable-sized groups of visitors, and to support collaborative visitor-visitor interactions. Because exhibit use is generally one-time-only, any interfaces created for these purposes must be easily learnable, or visitors may not use the exhibit at all. To guide the design of learnable mobile interfaces, we chose to employ the Consistency design
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Priscilla Jimenez PazminoLeilah Lyons