Oregon State University Free Choice Learning Lab

The semester is ending, and as I will be graduating the end of next week, it’s finally sinking in that my time in grad school is coming to a close. The final copy of my dissertation was handed in at the end of the last month, and ever since I have been considering what types of publications I would like to work on while transitioning back in the real world.

Deciding on publications is really more tricky than it seems. I’m trying to find opportunities that reflect my approach as both a researcher and an educator. Of course, my choices will be job dependent (a matter I am still diligently working on) due to time and project constraints, however I have been thinking about writing articles that both highlight the theory I generated around docents in science museum settings, and are able to communicate the practical implications for the field. Myself and Michelle are considering an article together that links our two pieces of work (mine on existing docent practice, hers on training methods), and myself and Susan on interpretation in museums. Both will be equally interesting to pursue. I’d particularly like to write something that is useful to informal science education settings, in terms of docent preparation and interpretive strategies in museum, as I am an advocate for promoting the visibility of free choice learning research to those that develop programming in the field. Just like scientist engagement in education and outreach is an important part of science education, as researchers we are also part of a community that should attempt to engage the free choice learning field in educational research. Outreach works both ways.

What’s interesting about this process is trying to work out which journals are also most fruitful to pursue. I was encouraged by both my committee to attempt to publish in the Journal of Interpretation (National Association for Interpretation), but I have also been thinking about Current (National Marine Educators Association), American Educational Research Journal (American Educational Research Association) and Visitor Studies (Visitor Studies Association), but there are a lot more to consider. It’s a little overwhelming, but also exciting. For me, this is where the rubber hits the road – the avenues where the outcomes of my work can become part of the larger free choice learning community.

I just got the news that my IRB application was approved, and I am now ready to proceed with play-testing! The prototype for Deme is currently occupying the space under our end table—a strange assortment of bits and pieces gathered into a plastic grocery bag.

The next step is to have my participants to play a round of an established tabletop strategy game. This will help me build my coding frame and observe how the group dynamic works with an established product. After that, we’ll take on Deme itself and discuss its mechanics afterward.*

Exposing a game to actual players can be a scary prospect. This thing has been twisting and turning in my mind for a long time now, and I’ve scaled it back significantly since I started. I want my rule system to be a skeleton, not a cage—this has become my development mantra. I remind myself that this is only the beginning of the process for Deme, and I have to keep the players in mind from the start. The game is about building and exploiting player-defined systems, after all.

Once I have a robust and enjoyable rule system in place, I want Deme to truly belong to anyone who wants to play it. It could succeed. It could fail. It could become something beautiful due to unforeseen changes—or even a complete overhaul—made by someone else.

That’s a long way off, though. Deme is still in the nursery, and I’m inviting a few people in to look it over and make sure it’s healthy. It won’t be moving out on its own until well after this project has concluded. I hope it knows how to do its own laundry by then.

*Oops! This is an idea that we had discussed, but it will not be part of this project. I’ll be building my coding frame and doing my analysis based on Deme alone. This will give me a chance to evaluate Deme more or less on its own terms first. It will also give me more time to analyze the data I have, as I’ll have less video data to crawl through. There’s some good existing literature on player discourse in established games.

The lab has purchased a bunch of relatively expensive equipment for use by our researchers at HMSC, students who may work mainly at the main campus in Corvallis or on their dissertations elsewhere, and our collaborators in other states and countries. Creating a system that allows for easy movement of the physical systems yet maintains the integrity is proving to be a complicated task for many reasons.

First, the equipment resides mainly at HMSC in Newport. Right now, only Shawn actually lives and works probably 75 percent of the time in Newport. Mark lives in Corvallis (about an hour away) but spends maybe half his week, roughly, in Newport, and Laura and I live in Corvallis but usually spend less than half the week in Newport. For all of us, the schedule of Newport vs. Corvallis vs. elsewhere work time is not at all regular. This means that no one is a good go-to person for handling the check-in and -out of the equipment unless a user is enough of a planner to know they need something (and know exactly what they need) in advance to ask one of us to bring it back to Corvallis.

And in reality, we don’t really want to have to act like overlords hoarding the equipment and doling it out when we feel like it. We’d like to have a system where people can access the equipment more freely but responsibly. But our shared spaces have other people going in and out that make it difficult to restrict access enough with the limited number of keys to the cabinet we have yet work without a main gatekeeper. Plus, things have just gone walkabout over the years since no one does keep track. People forget they have something, forget where it came from, leave the school and take it with them, not maliciously, but out of lack of time to worry about it and frankly, no one with interest in keeping up with the equipment. This especially happens with Shawn’s books. Full disclosure: I’m pretty guilty of it myself, at least of having things I borrow sit on my desk far beyond the time that it might be reasonable for me to keep them. No one else may be asking to use them, but if the resources aren’t on a shelf or in a database for browsers to know they’re available, it’s not really available in my eyes.

So we’ve struggled with this system. I tried to be the one in charge for a while, but I wasn’t travelling back and forth to Newport regularly, and it was a burden for people to come to me then me to find someone who was in Newport to pick it up and bring it to me to turn over to the borrower, and basically reverse the process when stuff was returned. Technically, the school probably wants us to have people sign off on taking equipment, even things with the small dollar values of these items, but that’s another layer of hassle to deal with.

Plus, the database programs we’ve tried to use to keep track have proved annoying for one reason or another. Again, most of the database programs are linked to one computer, so one person had to be the gatekeeper. For now, we’ve settled on a paper sign-out system on the door of the cabinet holding the equipment, but that doesn’t integrate with any computerized system that would be easy to track what’s out and in at any given time and when things are due back. The school multimedia system on campus uses barcode scanners, but the cost of implementing a system for our small use case is probably prohibitive. Peer-to-peer lending systems have the owners responsible for their own stuff, but even they often use online databases to track things. Suggestions welcome!

It’s just another thing that most people don’t think about that’s behind-the-scenes in the research process. And then when you go to do research, you spend way too much time thinking about it, or stuff gets lost.

With IRB approval “just around the corner” (ha!), I’ve been making sure everything is in place so I can hit the ground running once I get the final approval. That means checking back over my selection criteria for potential interviewees. For anyone who doesn’t remember, I’m doing phone interviews with COASST citizen science volunteers to see how they describe science, resource management, and their role in each.

I had originally hoped to do some fancy cluster analyses to group people using the big pile of volunteer survey data I have. How were people answering survey questions? Does it depend on how long people are involved in the program, or how many birds they’ve identified? … Nope. As far as I could tell, there were no patterns relevant to my research interests.

After a lot of digging through the survey data, I felt like I was back at square 1. Shawn asked me, “Based on what you’re interested in, what information would you NEED to be able to sort people?” My interview questions focus on people’s definitions of science and resource management, and their description of their role in COASST, science, and resource management. I expect their responses have a lot to do with their world view, their experience with science, and what they think about the role of science in society. Unfortunately, these questions were not included in the 2012 COASST volunteer survey.

As so often is the case, what I need and what I have are two different things. When I looked through what I do have, there were several survey questions that are at least somewhat related to my research interest. I’ve struggled with determining which questions are the most relevant. Or I should say, I’ve struggled with making sure I’m not creating arbitrary groupings of volunteers and expecting those to hold through the analysis phase of my project.

This process of selecting interviewees off survey responses makes me excited to create my own surveys in the future! That way I could specifically ask questions to help me create groupings. Until then, I’m trying to make do with what I have!

Just a few quick updates on this holiday about how lab is progressing.

-We’re re-thinking our microphone options for the touch tanks. We’re reluctant to drill into our permanent structure to run wires, so we’re back to considering whether the in-camera microphones will be sufficient or whether we can put in wireless mics. With the placement of the cameras to get a wide angle for the interactions and the loud running water, the in-camera mics will probably be too far away for clear audio pickup, but the wireless mics require their own receivers and audio channels. The number of mics we’d want to install could rapidly exceed the amount of frequency space available. Oh, and there’s the whole splashing water issue – mics are not generally waterproof.

-We finally got a lot more internet bandwidth installed, but now we have to wait for on-campus telecommunications to install a switch. We’re creeping ever closer … and once that’s done, we can hopefully re-up the frame rate on our cameras. Hopefully we’ll also be able to export footage more easily, especially remotely, as well. I’ll be testing this out myself as part of my new job and future research.

-I installed a NAS network drive of five 2 TB hard drives that will probably be our backup system. It needed about 40 hours to configure itself, so next week we should hopefully be able to get it fully in place.

-We took the whole system down for about an hour to replace the UPS as the old one was just shot.

-We’re looking into scheduling to accommodate school groups that don’t give permission for taping, as well as evening events. This should be possible through the Milestone Management software, but it’s not something we’ve explored yet.

-Remote desktop access to the servers is next (hopefully). This is also waiting on the campus telecom network switch.

-We’re migrating our exhibit software from Flash to HTML 5 in order to be more easily updated as well as incorporating the key/screen press logging code.

Happy Memorial Day!

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been reading about communities of practice (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002) for our Friday theory meetings. In that time, I have been busy with Project SEAL. The Model Classroom Team and I were going out to the schools to check in on the teachers and hear about their projects. There are some wonderful teachers doing wonderful projects with their students. Teachers and students are creating a thought-provoking, interactive play space, learning about beach pollution and its impact on the environment, and building a school garden.

While it was exciting to hear about how teachers and students were using the iPad minis available with the grant and to see differences students were making in their school environment, there was something that seemed to be mentioned in each meeting: the teachers needed a community. A community to share and learn within. A community where they could figure out which apps to download, how to download them, and how to use them. A community to collaborate with.

Having this experience came at a great time with reading the book. All of a sudden, I had a framework in which to think about communities of practice. Something that I’ve struggled with as the evaluator of Project SEAL is how I (and the project team) can encourage teachers to develop a community of practice without it seeming like a top-down approach.

To help me think my problem through, I turn to the part in the book about the challenge of distributed communities. Project SEAL is a distributed community – teachers are at 9 different schools throughout Lincoln County. We have a webpage, where teachers post assignments and can find resources, but as the authors write,

“Members cannot see how many other people are reading – and benefiting from – a threaded discussion. Unlike in-person meetings, teleconferences and Web sites don’t offer easy opportunities for informal networking. Because of these barriers, it takes more intentional effort for members to consult the community for help, spontaneously share ideas, or network with other members” (p. 117).

I think the key word there is easy. It can be done but needs to be encouraged and supported. As an evaluator I would recommend the project team, including the Model Classroom Team, to act as coordinators and facilitators on the Web site “to shepherd the process of connecting, passing on the request to people in the network who are likely to have helpful information or insight… Once they have found each other, members talk by phone, in person, via email, or through the community bulletin board…” (p. 127).

Hopefully, we can help build a community of practice over the second year of the project.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W.M. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Schools out…forever!

Nerd team assemble!

Negotiating an Equipment Sharing System

Interviewee selection criteria

Holiday Quick Updates

Encouraging Communities of Practice

Contact Info