NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery is presented in a set of interrelated chapters that describe the various challenges and opportunities in the complementary areas that make up cyberinfrastructure: computing systems, data, information resources, networking, digitally enabled-sensors, instruments, virtual organizations, and observatories, along with an interoperable suite of software services and tools. This technology is complemented by the interdisciplinary teams of professionals that are responsible for its development, deployment and its use in transformative
In mid-2007, the Sciencenter's executive director, Charlie Trautmann, traveled to Europe to survey a wide variety of science museums, centers, and other informal educational organizations and learn how they communicate the subjects of sustainability and global warming to the public. His report includes a new tool, called the "Museum Sustainability Index," which museums can use to assess their own progress in both becoming more sustainable organizations and communicating the science of sustainability to the public.
The media are the most pervasive disseminators of informal science education in this country. Watching commercial and non-commercial television will provide you with information on alligators or zygotes, bio-fuels or stem cells, polar bears or hurricanes. Radio, too, provides discussions of genetics and global warming and birds and stars. Often radio and television will cover science issues with a contextual overlay of politics or morality, so viewers and listeners can sense how they and their community relate to it. But for excitement, going to the theater to see an IMAX movie will take you
Technological literacy is essential to ensure lifelong engagement in rapidly changing societies. Three factors that affect learning in later adulthood are age-related declines in processing new information, changes in motivation and reprioritization of emotional wellbeing over new learning, and the ways in which beliefs and stereotypes influence motivation and learning.
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Casey LindbergEdwin CarstensenLaura Cartsensen
In 2006, the National Research Council initiated a study on Learning Science in Informal Environments. The purpose of the study is to synthesize a range of relevant literatures and recommend strategic directions for future research in the area. In the course of working on this study the Committee has found one of its challenges to be the identification and assessment of evaluation studies of informal science programs, in particular those which have probed science learning outcomes. To that end they commissioned the Institute for Learning Innovation to produce a paper that would help them
This paper lays out a theory of (re-)generative learning to explain how families and communities socialize young learners into thinking like scientists and mathematicians. Cultural communities and their families orient their young in varied ways toward the language, behaviors, and self-theories about the future presupposed in the learning of science and mathematics. Certain socialization processes and norms correspond closely with those that scientists and artists use in laboratories, studios, and rehearsals. Certain norms of politeness and patterns of language differ significantly from habits
In this paper, research on interest and motivation is revisited in the context of informal science learning (ISL) settings such as museums, out-of school or after-school clubs or groups, science camps, and enrichment programs1. The ISL context differs from traditional school "cookbook" science in a number of critical ways: rather than emphasizing science information, it is designed to engage participants in inquiry-informed and free-choice opportunities to work with authentic science2. Productive participation in the ISL setting should enable the development of scientific literacy and
This paper examines hypothesized outcomes of informal science learning experiences and analyzes the methods used to assess those outcomes. The authors deconstruct several studies on informal science learning to identify strengths and weaknesses and examine the potential of new approaches to informal learning.