We Got Punked

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Yes, we failed to change the default password on the cameras we installed. Someone managed to get ahold of the IP addresses, and guess the login and password. We escaped with only minor headaches, as all that happened was that they uploaded a few “overlay” images that appeared on some of the camera feeds, and a few text messages that seemed to be mostly warning messages to us about cybersecurity.

The hacker did change a few of our passwords for the cameras, so there were some from which we could not just delete the images. This has meant various levels of hassle to reset the cameras to default. For the white brick cameras, 30 seconds of holding a control button while the power cycles was sufficient. I didn’t even have to reset the IP address. For the dome cameras, it’s a bit more complex, as the IP address has to be reset, and I wasn’t around for that part originally so I’ll have to consult IT.

However, it makes us wonder about the wisdom of having even the camera views available without a password on the web, which we hadn’t considered was available before. You’d have to have the IP address to go to the view, but once you were there, our IP addresses are mostly sequential (depending on the day and which cameras are installed), so you could go visit each of them if you liked. There seems to be an option to turn this off, however, which I have also gone through and switched so that now you need not only the IP address, but the username and password in order to even view the feed.

Moral of this part of the story? Explore the default settings and consider what they truly mean. Be a Nervous Nellie and a bit of a cynic, assume the worst so you can plan for it.

UPDATE 5/16/13: I couldn’t get the 3301 dome cameras reset despite following the unplug, hold control button, re-plug power sequence. Our IT specialist thinks the hacker may have actually reset the default password via the firmware, since they should have automatically reset themselves to the same IP addresses using DHCP. So those two cameras have been pulled and replaced while the hacked ones are off to the IT hospital for some sleuthing and probably a firmware reset as well. I’ll let you know what the resolution is.

Metal and culture

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This post will be a light one, as most of my waking—and non-waking—hours are now occupied by a very small person who emerged from my wife recently. This very small person falls asleep when I play a certain type of music at a low volume, which got me thinking.

What makes a thing or circumstance “metal?” I’m not referring to metal in the material sense, but in the cultural and aesthetic sense. “Metal” as in “Slayer,” not “metal” as in “aluminum.” It’s a tough question I often amuse myself with, but it does have some relevance to my work as I wait to collect data.

The target audience for my game project is adult tabletop gamers, and I’ve observed a significant overlap between the tabletop gamer/metalhead communities of practice. I think it has something to do with an affinity for dragons and medieval imagery, but that’s conjecture on my part. I’m a very enthusiastic but somewhat peripheral participant in both areas.

I’ve found difficulty identifying the exact criteria used to determine if something is metal, but it’s fairly easy to reach consensus as to what is or is not metal. It would be easy to say it’s a subjective assessment, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. The criteria are difficult to pin down, but there’s a high degree of intersubjectivity here nonetheless. This is what intrigues me.

“Metalness” is a valuable—if not strictly necessary—aesthetic attribute to a large potential audience segment for my work. Ian Christe’s “Sound of the Beast” is a good primer on metal music and culture. Sam Dunn has done some work on metal as a cultural force and musical form, constructing a handy “heavy metal family tree” and several documentaries:

Aquarist Sid defined it rather succinctly: “Metal is black. Metal is contrast.” He elaborated that contrariness is an important aspect of a thing’s metalness. Volunteer coordinator Becca noted the importance of pain, while her husband cited common elements like death, depression, long hair, distorted guitars, double bass drum work and “long Scandinavian winters.”

What do you think? How would you define metal, musically and aesthetically? Can you give an example? What purpose do metal and its meanings serve to the audience(s)?

Let’s talk.

SEAL takes over Newport Elementary School

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On Tuesday night I made the hour-long drive from Corvallis to Newport to cover an important event: Newport Intermediate School’s Family Literacy Night. In the past couple of months I’ve written about Project SEAL and the Family Literacy Nights schools are supposed to host as part of the project. I was thoroughly impressed with what I saw at Newport Intermediate School.

 

The principal (who also goes through Project SEAL training) brought in Roland Smith. Roland was an enthusiastic speaker, talking to both adults and kids and sharing his life experiences that led him to be an author. One of the best parts of his presentation was when he said he’d take 4 minutes to teach us how to write a book. His first step was to write about something that interests you. He travels a lot but when he gets home he still has research to do, so he asked, “where do you go to do more research?” The library of course! His next big step was to create a storyboard, attempting to map out as much of the book as possible. Then you have to write a rough draft. The final step he shared with us is relevant to all of us who write, including us graduate students. This was Roland’s secret of writing (shhh!): writing is revision. No matter how many times you make edits, the editors find something and your final product looks different from your first product. It’s not something to be scared of, it’s the process of writing.

 

After Roland’s talk, the parents and students were released to purchase books – many of them did – and to go to sessions taking place throughout the school, including poetry reading, student writer share-outs, and guest readers. I was casually observing each room and standing in the hall watching the flow of traffic when all of a sudden I noticed something… groups of students were walking around with iPad minis. Before I knew it, one 4th grader and her mom were standing in front of me and the girl asked, “Can I ask you a few questions?” When I responded “yes” she said, “you will be recorded, if that’s ok”. What a researcher! I gave consent and the student looked at the sheet in front of her (which had four questions that she came up with herself – I asked later on) and asked, “what do you know about the Japanese tsunami?” She asked me three other questions on the topic, specifically about marine debris and the dock that came on shore in Newport.

 

At the end of my interview, I saw one of the teachers whose student interviewed me and praised her on getting her students so involved and for using the iPads! I later found out that this is only a portion of the student project for Project SEAL.

The end (I hope) and the beginning

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Both Laura and I defend next week, which is why the blog has been a little quiet of late. So, hopefully, it’s the end of our dissertations, and the beginning (or really, continuations) of careers working to create fun and engaging science learning opportunities for all. We both came into the program with a lot of years of actually doing outreach, with a little bit of experience in designing programs and even less in evaluating them. Now we’re set to leave with a great set of tools to maximize these programs and hopefully share the ideas we’ve learned with the broader field as we go.

So that’s set us to thinking about where we go from here. Now I have to build a broader research project that maybe builds off of the dissertation, but the dissertation was so self-contained, and relatively concrete in a way, that the idea of being able to do multiple things again is a bit daunting. I’m almost not sure where to begin! I will have some structure, of course, provided by the grant funding I get, and the partnerships I join. However, it’s important to think about what I want to achieve before I worry about the tools with which to do it – as always, start with the outcomes and work backwards.

It’s fortunate, then, that the lab group has started to discuss our broader research interests with the hopes of finding where they intersect in order to guide future discussions. We’ve been using prezi, creating frames for each sort of focus, then intending to “code” these frames by grouping those with similar topics and ideas. For example, one of my interests at this point is everyday scientist adults keeping current with professional science research developments, for purposes of using that information in their own personal and societal decisions, or simply for keeping tabs on how tax dollars are put to work, or for any other purpose they so desire. So, I’m interested in the hows, whens, and whys of everyday scientists accessing professional science information. This means I overlap with others in the groups working with museum exhibits, but also with people interested in public dialogue events, and in general, the affordances and constraints around learning in these ways.

As the leader of the group, Shawn has mentioned that this has been an exercise he’s used to think about his broader research goals as well, simply writing down his areas of focus, looking back at what he’s done over the past few years, and looking forward to where he wants to go. It also helps him to see what’s matched with his previous plans, and how circumstances or opportunities have changed those plans. I’m grateful to have this fortuitously-timed example of long-term goal setting and building a broader agenda, especially in such a small field where it’s likely that this is the largest group of collaborators in one place that I’ll have for a while. Hopefully, though, I’ll have my own graduate students before too long and maybe even other colleagues who focus on outside-of-school learning as well.

What sorts of tools do you use for figuring out long-term, broad, and somewhat abstract research goals?

What’s the Bleeding Edge for Museums?

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Last week, I talked about our eye-tracking in the science center at the Museums and the Web 2013 conference, as part of a track on Evaluating the Museum. This was the first time I’d attended this conference, and it turned out to be very different from others I’d attended. This, I think, meant that eye-tracking was a little ahead of where the audience of the conference was in some ways and behind in others!

Many of the attendees seemed to be from the art museum world, which has some different and some similar issues to those of science centers – we each have our generally separate professional organizations (American Association of Museums) and (Association of Science and Technology Centers). In fact, the opening plenary speaker, Larry Fitzgerald, made the point that museums should be thinking of ways that they can distinguish themselves from formal schools. He suggested that a lot of the ways museums are currently trying to get visitors to “think” look very much like they ways people think in schools, rather than the ways people think “all the time.” He mentioned “discovery centers” (which I took to mean interactive science centers), as places that are already trying to leverage the ways people naturally think (hmm, free-choice learning much?).

The twitter reaction and tone of other presentations made me think that this was actually a relatively revolutionary idea for a lot of folks there. My sense is that probably that stems from a different institutional culture that prevents much of that, except for places like Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, where Nina Simon is re-vamping the place around participation of community members.

So, overall, eye-tracking and studying what our visitors do was also a fairly foreign concept; one tweet wondered whether a museum’s mission needed to be visitor-centric. Maybe museums that don’t have to rely on ticket sales can rest on that, but the conference was trying to push a bit that museums are changing, away from places where people come to find the answer, or the truth and instead to be places of participation. That means some museums may also be generally lagging the idea of getting funding to study visitors at all, let alone spending large amounts on “capital” equipment, and since eye-trackers are expensive technologies designed basically only for that purpose, it seemed just a little ahead of where some of the conference participants were. I’ll have to check back in a few years and see h0w things are changing. As we talked about in our lab meeting this morning, a lot of diversity work in STEM free-choice learning is happening not in academia, but in (science) museums. Maybe that will change in a few years, as well, as OSU continues to shape its Science and Mathematics Education faculty and graduate programs.

Questions to ask when you’re in a job interview

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I recently found myself in a moment of panic.  I was visiting Austin, TX and had arranged to meet with an education director at a science museum.  I plan to move to Austin after I graduate, and wanted to get a feel for potential employment opportunities.  It wasn’t an interview, and we weren’t meeting to discuss a specific position, but I still felt unprepared.  The night before my meeting, I sent out a panicked email to the FCL lab group titled, “What should I ask the museum lady???”  To their credit, this amazing group of people immediately sent me responses with thoughtful questions to ask.

Talking with the group once I returned to Corvallis, we thought it might be handy to have a “back pocket” list of questions to ask your interviewer when you go interview for a position.  Here’s what we have to start, any other suggestions?

Let me know.  Katie W.

  • What direction do you see the museum and the (education, etc.) department heading in the next 3-5 years?
  • Are there any new initiatives or plans for expanding?
  • Does the program have guaranteed long-term support?

 

  • What is the education or teaching philosophy of this museum/department?
  • Where do you see yourself as an educator in 3-5 years, is this a place you feel would support your goals and future plans? (getting at if they are stuck in the same habits or willing to change)
  • Are there opportunities for professional development?  What are those like?
  • Do you have anyone that does research and evaluation?  If so, what kinds of things have they been working on lately?  If not, is the museum supportive of employees doing research and evaluation to improve programming?

 

  • Can you tell me more about the visitor demographics?
  • Do you host school groups?  Are there they have special classes for those groups?  Who is in charge of writing the programs, leading the classes, etc.?
  • How does the museum handle adult/child interactions?  (Such as parents to kids – do they see them as separate audiences?)
  • How does the museum train their volunteers?

 

  • What kinds of partnerships does this museum have with other museums or scientists in the area, or with the university?
  • Can you give me some examples of interdisciplinary projects that happen here?
  • How does the museum see themselves in relation to the community?
  • How are community resources leveraged in the museum?

 

  • What’s it like to live here?
  • I know a lot of museums are doing 21+ evening events and employees can attend for free.  Does this museum offer any adult only programs?  (It’s a great way to get to know other employees…)
  • How are salaries and raises determined?