Oregon State University Free Choice Learning Lab

Today this blog post will be a bit different for me. I usually do not write about things that are outside of my research, however as a female scientist, I would like to help spread the word about a fairly new resolution from the United Nations in 2011 – October 11th is International Day of the Girl. This year’s theme is “Innovating for Girls’ Education” with the philosophy that if girls are educated, this creates a better world for everyone. Attending classes on campus, walking the streets in Corvallis or even when I visit family back east, it is hard for me to remember that today in 2013 there are still so many females that have no or little access to learning. Education First reports that 33 % fewer girls than boys are enrolled in any form of a primary school setting (formal or home school settings).

Self-efficacy in many forms play some key roles in educational and learning research. I hope Larry Enchos approves of my summary here (but as this is a blog and is to be informal in nature here goes) it is when one believes that one can do something, they actually achieve it or do it better than when one thinks they can’t do it or has fear of the topic. For me and the population of in-service and pre-service educators I have had the pleasure of working with, this is important in science, especially in elementary science. Research suggests that elementary teachers often shy away from the topic of science out of fear or a belief that they are “bad” at “doing” science. Ok, that was my very short summary and now back to the topic of International Day of the Girl. From this day that now has been set aside by the UN, part of it is to empower girls in every community and to improve their self-efficacy, not per say in science, but in just the thought that they themselves are valuable individuals with special things to offer society. They are worth society’s investment; they are worth educating. When completing my MS at Oregon State University in Geography, one of my professors completed his PhD work in a community in Kenya. At the time it was so very impoverished that it was heart breaking. He worked with the local women to help them organize their native skills, taught them simple math and record keeping and over the time of his research the transformation was amazing. His research is impressive in his field, however he is most remembered for this “side” work. Educating the women in that village was transformational.

Below is taken directly from the UN website on the International Day of the Girl. As Free Choice Educators, it is important for us to remember that whatever our topic is that we are helping to prepare for the general public to encounter in our free choice learning settings, we should try to make the topic accessible and transformational as it may be the first time this individual is encountering this information.

“The fulfillment of girls’ right to education is first and foremost an obligation and moral imperative. There is also overwhelming evidence that girls’ education, especially at the secondary level, is a powerful transformative force for societies and girls themselves: it is the one consistent positive determinant of practically every desired development outcome, from reductions in mortality and fertility, to poverty reduction and equitable growth, to social norm change and democratization.
While there has been significant progress in improving girls’ access to education over the last two decades, many girls, particularly the most marginalized, continue to be deprived of this basic right. Girls in many countries are still unable to attend school and complete their education due to safety-related, financial, institutional and cultural barriers. Even when girls are in school, perceived low returns from poor quality of education, low aspirations, or household chores and other responsibilities keep them from attending school or from achieving adequate learning outcomes. The transformative potential for girls and societies promised through girls’ education is yet to be realized.
Recognizing the need for fresh and creative perspectives to propel girls’ education forward, the 2013 International Day of the Girl Child will address the importance of new technology, but also innovation in partnerships, policies, resource utilization, community mobilization, and most of all, the engagement of young people themselves.
All UN agencies, Member States, civil society organizations, and private sector actors have potential tools to innovate for and with girls to advance their education. Examples of possible steps include:
Improved public and private means of transportation for girls to get to school—from roads, buses, mopeds, bicycles to boats and canoes;
Collaboration between school systems and the banking industry to facilitate secure and convenient pay delivery to female teachers and scholarship delivery to girls;
Provision of science and technology courses targeted at girls in schools, universities and vocational education programs;
Corporate mentorship programs to help girls acquire critical work and leadership skills and facilitate their transition from school to work;
Revisions of school curricula to integrate positive messages on gender norms related to violence, child marriage, sexual and reproductive health, and male and female family roles;
Deploying mobile technology for teaching and learning to reach girls, especially in remote areas.
Girls face discrimination and violence every day across the world. The International Day of the Girl Child focuses attention on the need to address the challenges girls face and to promote girls’ empowerment and the fulfillment of their human rights.

http://www.un.org/en/events/girlchild/

This past weekend, I was able to watch the first episode of Dream School – a reality show that follows students who have not succeeded in traditional school as they come back for a second chance at getting a high school education and diploma. These kids are taught by celebrity educators. These are people who have been deemed successful in the eyes of the world in their respective fields. The hope is that the success of these individuals will motivate the unmotivated.

Watching the first episode reminded me of why I started going down the free choice learning (FCL) road. In the British pilot, well-known historian and documentarian Dr. David Starkey takes on a group of students and has an amazing lesson plan – Bling through the ages. As a history channel watching geek and lover of most things bling, I thought, AWESOME. This is going to be a good one. Well, you judge for yourself – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkrhhlAQgu0.

I think the premise of this show is in indicator of what is happening in our society. This interesting infographic by the Huffington Post gives us some statistics around the phenomenon or epidemic, depending on your point of view- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/sundance-infographic-americas-school_n_4032373.html. Our schools do not seem to be addressing the learning needs of a large portion of the next generation. Can lessons from FCL help? If you guess that I would answer affirmatively, you would be correct. But I think that the answer, as many answers to life’s hard questions, is not as simple as that. There is a lot that FCL needs to take into consideration before leaping into a hero-saving mode of formal learning environments.

The biggest issue that FCL has is scalability. Museums, zoos, and informal learning venues are excellent at accommodating large groups and introducing them to interesting concepts and themes. But the information that groups get are just morsels or amuse-bouches of knowledge. The exhibits titillate, provoke, and stimulate the mind, but there is little research that demonstrates the long-term acquisition of larger concepts or building of sequential knowledge. There is a much needed socio-cultural place for FCL environments, but until we can hold learners for a long period of time and move them from point A to point D, formal learning environments will still be the environment that fosters this type of learning.

The next biggest issue that FCL environments have is assessing the learner. There are so many stimuli and learners arrive with many preconceived ideas and misconceptions, it is difficult to truly assess what the individual is actually learning in a FCL environment. The best we can do as social scientists is to see how learning is occurring and take a snapshot of the learner at that time and space. This is not to say that formal environments really know how to do this well. On the contrary. It is just that the formal environments have more years of trying to do it.

The final big hurdle is the culture. Learning and motivation are culturally rooted. And whether FCL environments want to admit or not, they are cultural institutions imparting a certain way of looking at the world. Art museums, aquariums, and science centers all impart a certain perspective and view. The problem doesn’t come with that view – it comes with not acknowledging that they hold that view. Art museums deem what is beautiful. Aquariums deem what is worth seeing of the ocean. And science centers show a western perspective of science. But they do not hold the corner on what is beautiful, worthy, or scientific. These institutions help us narrow down from a vast field into digestible facts, but in the narrowing down comes a belief that their visitors will only need to deem that beautiful, worthy, or scientific. They sometimes forget that there is a large world of “other” available for their visitors and from which their visitors come. It is in remembering this and embracing it when crosses their thresholds which make the FCL environment transcend the cultural institution to a true place of learning. Yet, as I write this, I know it is a difficult task to accomplish – difficult but not impossible. Again, this is not something that the formal environment has conquered in the least.

These are some of the biggest challenges I see FCL environments facing and why they cannot be the panacea for our ailing educational system. But I definitely think they have their place in learning, something that formal educators are really beginning to embrace. What about you? Do you agree with these areas or do you think I am selling FCL short?

Members of the Cyberlab were busy this week. We set up the multi touch table and touch wall in the Visitors Center and hosted Kate Haley Goldman as a guest researcher. In preparation for her visit, there were modifications to camera and table placement, tinkering with microphones, and testing the data collection pieces by looking at the video playback. It was a great opportunity to evaluate our lab setup for other incoming researchers and their data collection needs, and to try things live with the technology of Ideum!

Kate traveled from Washington D.C. to collect data on the interactive content by Open Exhibits displayed on our table. As the Principal of Audience Viewpoints, Kate conducts research on audiences and learning in museums and informal learning centers. She is investigating the use of multi touch technology in these settings, and we are thankful for her insight as we implement this exhibit format at Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Watching the video playback of visitor interactions with Kate was fascinating. We discussed flow patterns around the room based on table placement. We looked at the amount of stay time at the table depending on program content. As the day progressed, more questions came up. How long were visitors staying at the other exhibits, which have live animals, versus the table placed nearby? While they were moving about the room, would visitors return to the table multiple times? What were the demographics of the users? Were they bringing their social group with them? What were the users talking about? Was it the technology itself or the content on the table? Was the technology intuitive to use?

I felt the thrill of the research process this weekend. It was a wonderful opportunity to “observe the observer” and witness Kate in action. I enjoyed seeing visitor use of the table and thinking about the interactions between humans and technology. How effective is it to present science concepts in this format and are users learning something? I will reflect on this experience as I design my research project around science learning and the use of multi touch technology in an informal learning environment such as Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Super Mario moves like a machine.

He almost never turns around unless he must. He runs rightward. He jumps rightward. He crouches and slides under bricks without slowing. He acquires coins. He kills with fire and boot-heel. Still he runs. Rightward—ever rightward.

Finally, a difficult jump briefly halts his progress. Super Mario dies. For now.

My wife puts down the controller. It’s my turn, and Luigi’s. I went from the Atari 2600 straight to the Super Nintendo in my youth. The NES, while much-loved and present in my childhood memories, was not a major factor in my early development as a gamer.

Luigi looks terrified, and far from Super. He hesitates. He backtracks. He pauses. He approaches his first Goomba anxiously, and his jump is ragged and imprecise. The original Super Mario Bros. has somewhat drifty controls compared to its successors, and it always takes me some time to re-adjust. Too long.

Death comes quickly to Luigi. My wife finishes the game a few lives later, with Mario’s triumphant campaign only infrequently punctuated by Luigi’s fitful progress and inevitable tragedies.

Non-verbal communication among players is a big part of tabletop gaming, and I’ll be looking at that as I analyze interactios around my game Deme. However, as in the anecdote above, games—electronic or otherwise—come with their own non-verbal cues and even a body language of sorts. This can be more noticeable when players aren’t able to physically observe or interact with each other.

An arrangement of chess pieces could be interpreted as aggressive or defensive. A player’s confidence and skill can show in online games through movement and action. In these cases, with in-game actions—and sometimes movement—being limited and uniform, interactions come at least partially pre-coded for the researcher.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and you can see it just about everywhere. I’m a big fan of playing games together with friends and family in the same room, but I’ve often been amazed by how much meaningful information I’ve exchanged online with fellow players I’ve never seen, and with whom I’ve never exhanged a typed or spoken word. Feints, counter-feints, acknowledgements, threats, camaraderie, humor—humans will find ways to communicate with any tools available. In online games, these tools may be anything from complex role-playing avatars to playing cards or two-dimensional spaceships.

Would anyone else like to share an anecdote or two about nonverbal communication within games? The novel ways people find to convey a message can often be just as interesting as the message itself.

Maybe I’ve been around universities too long, but fall always seems like New Year’s to me. Part of it, of course, is the excitement of a new school year – new classes, new students and colleagues, new projects. Classes start this week in Corvallis, and I’m gearing up to teach a class I’ve taught many times before – Communicating Ocean Sciences with Informal Audiences. If you are not familiar with the class, check out the website here. One of the reasons I love teaching this class is because even though I was involved from the get go in helping imagine and design it, it seems new every time I teach it. Part of it is that constant tweaking that comes with reflecting on what we like and don’t like about our teaching. But the COSIA class also seems to be a great palate for thinking about and working on a whole variety of themes and ideas and topics that emerge in informal science education and free-choice learning work. The twin themes that are running through my head as I develop the class this year are identity and community.

We just learned last week that we were awarded a new NSF AISL grant called COASSTal Communities of Science. The project partners the FCL Lab with University of Washington researchers Julia Parrish and Jane Dolliver who run a very successful and impressive citizen science project, COASST, that spans beaches from Alaska through Northern California. With this new grant, COASST is responding to volunteers, communities they serve, and national calls for citizen scientists to address the issue of marine debris in the Pacific Northwest. COASST will be developing new protocols and modules for monitoring marine debris that should bring to that realm the same level of rigor and engagement that their current program has been recognized for. I’m excited because our role in this project is to carry out research on recruitment and retention of citizen scientists in both COASST’s traditional programming as well as the new marine debris modules. We’ll be looking at a host of factors that affect both, trying to understand the complex relationships among personal, social, cultural and ecological factors supporting the program. I’m even more excited because we have developed an Activity Theory framework for the qualitative and quantitative parts of the study and will be looking explicitly at COASST as a community (or communities) of practice. We’ll be researching participants’ identities vis-à-vis the science they are involved in and how those identities develop and change over time.

This research focus on communities of practice and identity change will inevitably shape the look and feel of the COSIA class this fall as well. At the most basic level, we’ll all be working in the class to develop a short-term community of practice around communicating ocean sciences. But at the larger level, the class itself is designed to help scientists and educators in graduate school at OSU develop identities as people who are comfortable and expert not only in their science, but also expert at communicating it. For many folks who take the class this means changing their understanding of a whole variety of things – from the nature of science to the nature of teaching and learning. We are encouraging them to do nothing less than become a different kind of person—and they are learning that when we ask people to learn about OUR science, we may be asking them to become different kinds of people – the kind of people who care about and want to be involved in science. And that’s identity change at work. Once you recognize that, models of communication based on experts getting knowledge out to publics just don’t hold any water anymore. Communication is about shifting and shaping identities as much as about shaping knowledge. That means that the stakes are always higher than you think and that even the simple act of facilitating a density activity at a local museum might be about negotiating identity as much as having fun with water!

One week ago I was not a Twitter user. After hearing about it for years and seeing other people use it, I wasn’t convinced it was a tool for me. I personally have problems communicating in 140 characters or less (mainly because I don’t usually put a limit on myself) and I think Twitter has changed language use. We see words not being capitalized, the use of numbers where letters should be, an insane amount of shorthand, and #somanyhashtags I can’t #decipher what someone’s actually #tryingtocommunicate.

And then I heard this story on NPR, which claims that Twitter can boost literacy. And I got to thinking, am I just uncomfortable with Twitter because I haven’t fully immersed myself in the experience? Is there something to it that I’m missing? So on Monday, I created an account (@mamileham) to see how this cultural tool is used and what it means for us as researchers of free-choice learning.

Twitter is a cultural tool that’s here to stay. It allows people to connect and communicate in a way like never before. As this video says, “you wouldn’t send an email to a friend to tell them you’re having coffee. Your friend doesn’t need to know that.” But what if someone is truly interested in the little things? With people connecting (@) and mentioning (#) where they are and what they’re doing, we can follow and understand what they are experiencing and possibly how they’re evaluating and making sense of the world. With Twitter, the video says, “[people can] see life between blog posts and emails.” What if we could see the meaning making (in almost real time) between entering and exiting a museum based on an individual’s tweets?

I’m not completely sold on Twitter boosting literacy, but I do understand how we are using social media to share information, find information, think about who we are (i.e., identity formation), and that tweeting is a new language. You have to learn and then know how to use the @ and # but maybe it’s worth learning. However, think about how all those #hashtags sound when used in real life.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Internatinal Day of the Girl

FCL and formal learning environments – a panacea?

Agile research in action!

What we say through play

Identity, community and the new year

Contact Info