I have been absent from blog posting as of late due to the whirlwind of grad school, but that also means there is quite a bit to share related to work in the lab and research! My last post described the experience at ASTC in North Carolina – a great opportunity to see work at other science and technology centers, and to meet professionals in the field that are doing incredible things at these locations. Since then I have been ramping up on my personal research, but also balancing coursework.
I am really excited to be enrolled in Oregon State University’s Free Choice Learning (FCL) series this year. Everything I was learning “in the field” is now gaining context through courses in personal, sociocultural, and physical dimensions of learning. I have the opportunity to practice evaluation methods through assignments and read papers related to my research on family group interactions in the museum. I am thankful that I get to take these classes from Dr. John Falk and Dr. Lynn Dierking, two researchers that have studied FCL for many years!
In the visitor center, we are focused on getting our facial recognition cameras consistently working and capturing data. We have been collecting images, but getting 11 cameras to stream a lot of data at the same time is challenging as both the hardware and software have to sync. This has been a great learning opportunity in trial and error, but also learning the “language” of a field I am not familiar with. As I have to troubleshoot with engineers and software developers, I have been learning vocabulary related not only to the camera system, but also the usability of configuring the cameras and the software. Beyond the task of setting this up, it is an experience that I will reflect on with future projects that require me to learn the language of another industry, embrace trial and error, and patience in the process.
In addition to Cyberlab duties, I am busy coding video of families using the multi-touch table collected in August 2014. Over the past twenty years, research on family learning has shown us how exhibits are often used (much of this research was done by Falk, Dierking, Borun, Ellenbogen, among others). I am curious about the quality of interactions occurring at the touch table between adults and children. I developed a rubric based on three different dimensions of behaviors – responsive engagement, learning strategies and opportunities, and directive engagement, and whether they are observed at low, moderate, or high levels. These categories are modified from the types of behavior outlined by Piscitelli and Weier (2002) in relation to adult-child interactions surrounding art. From their work, they found that a distribution of behaviors from these categories support the value of the interactions (Piscitelli & Weier, 2002). Each category looks at how the adult(s) and child(ren) interact with each other while manipulating the touch table. I also modeled the rubric after what is used in the classroom to assess teacher and student interactions around tasks.
An example of a high level of responsive engagement would be that the adults and children are in close proximity to each other while using the exhibit, their hands are on the touch surface for a majority of the time, the adults are using encouraging words and acknowledging the child’s statements or questions, and there similar levels of emotional affect expressed between them. Learning strategies focuses more on the verbalization of the content of the exhibit and the integration of information, such as connecting the content to prior knowledge or experiences external to exhibit use. Finally, directive engagement looks at whether the adult is providing guidance or facilitating use of exhibit by directing a task to be performed, showing a child how to accomplish the activity. From this data, I hope to understand more at depth how the table is used and the ways adults and children interact while using it. This may give us some idea as to how to support software and content design for these forms of digital interactives, which are becoming more popular in the museum environment.
My goal is to have videos coded by the end of the month, so back to work I go!
Piscitelli, B., & Weier, K. (2002). Learning With, Through, and About Art: The Role of Social Interactions. In S. G. Paris (Ed.), Perspectives on Object-Centered Learning in Museums (pp. 121–151). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
