The importance of Ice Stories derives from its creative use of the latest communications media to convey the latest polar research. By teaching scientists to communicate, by establishing a Web site devoted to polar research, Ice Stories humanizes science and brings it to a broad, diverse audience with unprecedented immediacy, thanks to the growth of digital media. This project comes when the stakes—posed by planetary warming— have never been higher, when the techniques of media production have never been more accessible, and when the potential audience—fueled by public concern and IPY activity—has never been larger. The Exploratorium will train scientists as correspondents, shape and channel their work, and create the Web site that will be a major international hub showcasing the range of IPY research and commentary. The training and production phases of the project were field-tested with polar scientists in 2006, and the museum is an experienced producer of Web and live programs from the poles. Ice Stories conceptualizes a new model of communication with great implications for informal science education. Scientists can now bring their research directly to the public, instead of having it filtered through traditional journalistic media. Ice Stories achieves this new model by organizing three innovative components: intensive media training for polar researchers; a museum-based production unit; and the project’s informal-education Web 2.0 portal. Scientist-produced video, audio, photo-essays and blogs will be accessed free via the Web site and such technology platforms as downloadable podcasts, vodcasts, RSS feeds and by posting on popular Web sites and by dissemination through journalistic media. Deliverables include (1.) Correspondent Training—week-long workshops in media for a minimum of 20 scientists in spring and fall 2008. (2.) Productions—STEM content from correspondents, each spending 5-10 hours a week producing from the field. (3.) Media Assets Database—fully accessible correspondent productions plus material from other polar projects and collaborating institutions. (4.) Exhibits—IPY Production Studio at the Exploratorium and project material used internationally in IPY exhibitions. The project design benefits from the museum’s 30 years of making science accessible to visitors, its 22 years of creating professional development courses for educators, and its use of scientists as research guides in previous Webcast projects. Project leaders have polar experience and have collaborative relationships with researchers. Instructors for media workshops include top professionals, and project partnerships encompass major projects at both poles.
Portal to the Public is a program designed to assist informal science education (ISE) institutions as they seek to bring scientists and public audiences together in face-to-face public interactions that promote appreciation and understanding of current scientific research and its application. Led by Pacific Science Center (WA), in collaboration with Explora (NM), the North Museum of Natural History and Science (PA) and the Institute for Learning Innovation (MD), the program model was implemented and evaluated at five additional museums and science centers during 2007-2011. The project goals were to create a flexible and scalable guiding framework that would support ISE institutions build relationships with their local scientific community, design professional development workshops for scientists, and create public program formats featuring scientists. The project included thorough research and evaluation of the guiding framework, dissemination process, and implementation at expansion sites. The Portal to the Public project team has produced an Implementation Manual as a guide for institutions planning to implement a Portal to the Public-type program, available for download at the project website (http://www.pacificsciencecenter.org/Portal-to-the-Public/portal). It includes the Catalog of Professional Development Elements, a practical guide to creating and facilitating professional development experiences for scientists.
A three-year project, Science And Youth (SAY), integrates the existing curriculum, instructional design, and training capacity of the 4-H Science Experiences and Resources for Informal Educational Settings (SERIES) project with high school students exploring careers in teaching at eleven existing "teaching magnet" high schools across the country. The SAY project expands the quantity and quality of informal science education experiences by accomplishing the following objectives: 1) prepare one thousand teenage teachers/leaders to present SAY activities to forty thousand elementary school age youth: 2) involve participating youth in a total of five hundred community service projects; 3) involve five hundred teenage leaders in mentoring relationships with local scientists, and; 4) have seventy-five percent of the participants continue their education in science and/or the teaching profession. SAY uses a teens-as-leaders model to engage younger youth (ages 9-13) in hands-on, inquiry-based science activities that result in science-based community services projects. SAY offers youngsters a vehicle for experiencing how science problem solving strategies are applied to home and community problems. The pedagogy of the SAY project represents the best of current research on science education, and offers an innovative model for the preparation of a new cadre of science teachers.
Blackside, Inc. is producing a television series and an outreach component about minority scientists. The goals of the six-hour prime-time series, "Breakthrough: People of Color in Science," are to raise the consciousness of the general public that is largely unaware of the significant contribution of scientists of color and to provide role models that will encourage young people to consider science and engineering careers. The programs will feature the work of contemporary African-American, Latino and Native American scientists and engineers who are active in cell biology, astrophysics, applied mathematics and other fields of science. The stories of their scientific achievements will present both women and men, old and young, at different stages of their careers, and will explore the professional, educational and social worlds they live and work in. Viewers will have immediate access to a comprehensive follow-up effort that will connect them with local, regional and national opportunities in informal science education. Blackside will collect information from existing resources and institutions as well using source material from several extensively researched databases geared toward minority students. Using all of this information, Blackside will create a metadatabase that will connect teachers, parents, mentors, and students to a rich variety of educational programs: extracurricular classes, mentoring programs, national science contests, teacher training workshops, and a myriad of on-line services. To ensure immediate access and, where possible, to customize the information to viewers needs, Blackside will disseminate it through a variety of means: an 800-number with a direct fax-back capability, an on-line service, a CD-ROM, and a printed packet delivered by mail. A principal target audience is gatekeepers in students' lives: parents, teachers, and scientists interested in becoming mentors. The target audience also includes students from fourth th rough twelfth grades. Joseph Blatt will serve a PI for this project and co-executive producer for the television series. His previous experience include serving as executive producer of "Scientific American FRONTIERS" and as a producer/director for several NOVA programs. He also has been executive producer for three television series/college credit courses in mathematics. Henry Hampton will be the other co-executive producer. He was the creator and executive producer of the 14-hour, award winning series, "Eyes on the Prize," about America's civil rights movement. The principal educational consultant will be Ceasar McDowell, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Michael Ambrosino, the original executive producer of NOVA, will be the principal science television consultant.
Ornithology is one of the few scientific disciplines to which amateurs can still make significant contributions. Whether they observe birds at a feeder, count birds for a national census, or conduct a simple experiment, their activities contribute greatly to our knowledge of birds. Furthermore, participants in bird study programs not only learn about birds, they also become more aware of environmental problems. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology exists to facilitate such amateur involvement and education. This proposal is aimed at strengthening our education programs and expanding them to include under-served audiences in the inner city. We propose to evaluate the extent to which our radio program, magazine, and Project FeederWatch appeal to various audiences and how effective these programs are at communicating information about birds and in stimulating involvement. Based on this evaluation, we will modify our programs, then evaluate them again. We are also proposing a brand-new volunteer-assisted data gathering program, which we call the National Science Experiment. In cooperation with other organizations, volunteers will look at the biology of pigeons in our cities, food preferences of winter birds across the United States, and the habitat requirements of neotropical migrant tanagers. The results of these studies will be of interest to both ornithologists and birders; furthermore, participants in the project will gain first-hand involvement with the process of science.
Science-By-Mail is a mentorship program between scientists and youth whereby youth have a subscription for three scientific challenge packets each year, create solutions, and receive responses from a personal scientist. Science-By-Mail brings the excitement of science discovery into classrooms and homes of children around the country and provides them with positive, approachable role models of professional scientists. A grant of $622,088 over three years will allow us to strengthen and expand this program nationally, focusing especially on increasing participation by minority youth and scientists. Specifically, support is requested for the design and development of 12 new challenge packets; to increase participation to 47,900 youth, 4,500 scientists, and 26 regional chapters; promote increased corporate and other private-sector involvement in the program; and to conduct an annual evaluation. The AAAS will aid in the recruitment of volunteer scientists. In addition, we will work together with the National 4-H Council to pilot the program within that organization (with a membership of 5.4 million), focusing particularly on minority youth. Anticipated income form the expansion of Science-By-Mail will make the program self-sufficient at the end of the grant period.//
The National Audubon Society, the National Association of Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, Earth Force, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are identifying strategies and supports that move citizen science volunteers up the ladder of engagement from contributory to collaborative to co-creative participants in scientific research. The Citizens, Science, and Conservation project is testing strategies for engaging senior citizens (ages 60+) and underserved youth (ages 16-18) residing in Illinois, North Carolina and California in conservation-focused citizen science projects. This inter-generational project is engaging 45 seniors and 45 youth from three communities located near important bird areas (IBAs) in bird conservation activities and studying how to immerse them together in authentic scientific research. The goals of the project are to (1) learn how to better recruit and sustain deeper relationships with seniors and youth, (2) facilitate the roles seniors and youth can play as collaborators in field research and conservation science, (3) study ways that seniors and young people, as well as scientists and non-scientists, might interact more effectively while in training and in the field, and (4) study the cognitive and affective impacts of such collaborations upon both volunteers and professionals. Evaluation data on implementation, impact, and scale-up are being collected on three comparison groups of citizen scientists (new, core, and model). Audubon plans to disseminate a plan for implementing senior-youth paired collaborative and co-created citizen science programs to 2,100+ IBA programs in 42 states, 50+ nature centers and its 480 local chapters.
The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) at the University of California-Berkeley is designing an interactive web portal and public forum, Ars Synthetica, to communicate SynBERC's research on synthetic biology, an emerging field that builds on advances in molecular, cell, and systems biology. Synthetic biologists will soon design and fabricate biological entities to accomplish particular tasks. Biological materials properties (gene sequences, protein properties, natural genetic circuit design) must be formulated into a set of design rules that can be used to engineer new biological entities. These design issues raise ethical concerns among the public and will form the core focus of Ars Synthetica. The forum will use Omeka, an open source software platform that will afford research scientists and the public with the ability to engage in community-wide discussions and debates, and will be customized to utilize a variety of media, such as articles, photo essays, and video vignettes addressing key questions surrounding synthetic biology. The forum will provide numerous links to research articles, data, and relevant websites, including SynBERC's synthetic biology website and the Anthropology of the Contemporary websites. Video webcasts will include guest lecturers with diverse perspectives on synthetic biology aimed at both scientists and the public, which will be disseminated on social networks, such as YouTube, Flickr, and WordPress blogs. The forum has the potential to make a significant impact on public discourse on science, as well as provide an important new exemplar for public engagement in research that can be replicated in other fields of science and informal science education.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jay KeaslingPaul Rabinow
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Citizen science projects engage members of the general public in professionally directed research and participatory action research projects that investigate local environmental issues. The Cornell University - Laboratory of Ornithology is requesting funding to support a national conference and the development of a web-based Citizen Science Toolkit to inform these programs. The Toolkit will provide a framework for scientists and educators to develop, implement and evaluate independent citizen science projects. Deliverables include an invitational conference where best practices will be identified, in addition to the electronic toolkit that will include a Citizen Science Manual and instruments for assessing the effectiveness of projects. A virtual community of educators that develop and implement citizen science projects in a variety of STEM areas will be created. It is anticipated this work will improve the quality of citizen science projects across the country.
This project proposes using three complementary strategies to engage, inform and inspire large audiences. (1) A national tour called "Stories from a Changing Planet" that will include in-person presentations and hands-on activities by Polar scientists at science centers, museums, libraries and schools across the country. (2) the "HiDef video Science Story Capture Corp" team of professional videographers HD footage will be made available as public domain materials accessible to government research agencies, universities,science centers and others. (3) Video and Audio podcasts distributed throught iTunes, google, Yahoo and IPY websites. The project will have front end, formative and summative evaluations.
ScienceQuest is an innovative program created by the Education Development Center that fosters an interest in science and technology among adolescents ages 10-14. This program builds on the successful "ThinkQuest" model, in which small teams of 2-3 students work with adult coaches to research subjects of interest and share their knowledge through the creation of websites. "ScienceQuest" teams focus on science topics and are housed in HUD Neighborhood Network technology centers, located in communities with HUD-assisted or insured housing residents. Participants include individuals with and without disabilities from low-income urban areas. Students select a science topic and research it using online resources, hands-on experiments and visits to museums and science centers. Coaches such as scientists, teachers, museum staff and other role models, as well as on-line scientists, provide assistance by setting goals, devising an action plan and identifying appropriate resources. The "I-Search" model, a four-step strategy used to direct student inquiry, is used to guide investigations and aid in content acquisition. Once completed, websites are mounted on the "ThinkQuest" server. Parental participation is encouraged throughout the process. "ScienceQuest" will be piloted in the greater Boston area in year one, and disseminated to 75 Neighborhood Network sites throughout the country in years two and three of the grant. Each site may have one or more teams. With more than 500 Neighborhood Networks in place, "ScienceQuest" has the potential for widespread dissemination.
This project will develop a "Research Ambassador" program whereby a small cadre of scientists will be trained to communicate rain forest canopy ecology to underserved public audiences in the northwest U. S. and elsewhere. A set of collaborating academic researchers and informal science educators will draw from successful dissemination experiences in the field of forest canopy studies. An interdisciplinary research/education team will recruit six "research ambassadors" and provide tools to help them effectively speak and write directly to the public. The team and the ambassadors will create dissemination materials for each ambassador, and contribute to a canopy research website for public audiences. In addition to communicating research to public audiences, this project will provide innovative connections between science and society that can present pragmatic solutions to problems of scientific communication to the public.