Coming to the breaking point

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And I don’t just mean Thanksgiving! Lately, I’ve run across an exhibit, a discussion, and now an article on things wearing down and breaking, so I figured that meant it was time for a blog post.

It started with my visit to the Exploratorium, who find that stuff breaks, sometimes unexpectedly. Master tinkerers and builders that they are, they made it into an exhibit of worn, bent or flat-out broken parts of their exhibits. It may take hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of uses, but when your visitorship is near a million per year, it doesn’t take that many days to find micro-changes suddenly visible as macro changes.

 

Then Laura suggested that we keep track of all the equipment we’ve been buying in case of, you guessed it, breaking (or other loss). So we’ve started an inventory that not only will serve as a nice record for the project of all the bits and bobs we’ve had to buy (so far, over 300 feet of speaker wire for just 10 cameras), but also will help us replace them more easily should something go wrong. Which we know it will, eventually, and frankly, we’ll have a sense of how quickly it goes wrong if we keep our records well. In our water-laden touch pools and wave tanks environment, this very likely will be sooner than we hope.

Finally, John Baek’s Open and Online Lifelong Learning newspaper linked to this story from Wired magazine about the people who are deliberately trying to break things, to make the unexpected expected.

So, have a great Thanksgiving break (in the U.S.), and try not to break anything in the process.

Living in a Zone of Proximal Development

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One of the great things about being in graduate school is the variety of experiences that are available in the competition for funding. Each one offers unique opportunities for growth and learning, but some are certainly more challenging than others. I’m currently working on a project that utilizes my skills in web design, but the requirements of the project are beyond what I was formerly able to perform. The past few weeks have been full of learning and expanding and lots of trial and error. I finally found a few useful printed books (especially the Drupal Bible) and with their help I’ve been more successful in building the website with the functionality I envisioned. There is still quite a ways to go, and it would be easier if I had direct access to the servers, but I’m still proud of the work I’ve been able to do and look forward to adding “web development” to my Curriculum Vitae.

(Since the website is still under quite a bit of construction, I have chosen not to release the URL at this point.)

Our PHRED friends

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A new partnership with the Philomath (pronounced fill-OH-muth for you out-of-town readers) High Robotics Engineering Division (PHRED) helped the HMSC Free-Choice learning lab overcome a major information design hurdle. An on-going challenge for our observation system is recording usage of small, non-electronic moveable exhibit components – think bones, shells, levers, and spinning wheels.

PHRED mentors Tom Health and Tom Thompson will work with students to develop tiny, wireless microprocessor sensors that can be attached to any physical moving exhibit component and report its use to our database. The team will be using the popular Arduino development tool that has been the technological heart of the Maker movement.

This is a great partnership – the PHRED team has all the skills, enthusiasm, and creativity to tackle the project and build successful tools – not to mention gaining the notoriety that comes from working on an NSF-funded project. Oregon Sea Grant gains more experience integrating after school science clubs into funded research projects, while meeting the ever-challenging objective of engaging underserved communities.
Thanks to Mark for this update. 

What is Consciousness? How do you define it?

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What is your definition of consciousness?  How was your consciousness formed?  Have you ever stopped and thought about this before?  What are your thoughts?  Today in Dr. Rowe’s theory meeting we had much conversation about consciousness in relation to Vygotsky and the sociocultural theory of learning.

Here is a quote from Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind by James V. Wertsch:

On the basis of this Marxian axiom Vygotsky argues that ‘the socialdimension of consciousness id primary in time and in fact.  The individual dimension of consciousness is derivative and secondary’ (1979, p.30)” 1985, p. 58

In our meeting today the question was proposed that does this mean that for Vygotsky that there is no consciousness without the social aspect of society?  The interactions between people and the formed realization of what these actions mean?  What about the individualism of the person?  What about the biological make-up of individuals?  Do these factors play a role in the Vygotsky view of consciousness?  Do they play a role in your view of consciousness?

The example one can think of when trying to wrap your brain around these questions is the symbol of language.  One does not just know language, but one typically has the needed “biological functions” to produce the mechanics of sound.  Language, and some argue even speech is a social behavior.

It became clear in our conversation that this view seems to have some deficits, mainly the lack of attention to the individual, the development of the individual as they grow and “learn” before the age of five and the role of the of form instruction given (school learning is very different then at home or social learning for example).  As thoughts were brought forth, it seemed that we considered the role of the individual married with the social interaction begins that formation of consciousness.  As the individual grows and develops the skills they acquire from the social group they are in as well as their own physical progression increases the amount of signs and tools for that individual.  When one is able to deliberately choose what tool to use, knows how to use the tool, why they want to use the tool and what outcome they are expecting from the tool use, consciousness is forming.  One statement that even takes this further by Dr. Rowe is that once an individual learns to use a tool, it potentially changes the way that individual will do all future things.

So what are your thoughts?

Defining an audience

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It seems that a convenience sample really is the only way to go for my project at this stage. I have long entertained the notion that some kind of randomization would work to my benefit in some abstract, cosmic way. The problem is, I’m developing a product for an established audience. As much as I’d like to reach out and get new audiences interested, that will have to come later.

That sounds harsh, which is probably why I hadn’t actually considered it until recently. In reality, it could work toward my larger goal of bringing in new audience members by streamlining the development process.

I’ve discovered that non-gamers tend to get hung up on things that aren’t actually unique to Deme, but are rather common game elements with which they’re not familiar. Imagine trying to design a dashboard GPS system, then discovering that a fair number of your testers aren’t familiar with internal combustion engines and doubt they will ever catch on. I need people who can already drive.

Games—electronic, tabletop or otherwise—come with a vast array of cultural norms and assumptions. Remember the first time you played a videogame wherein the “Jump” button—the button that was just simply always “Jump” on your console of choice—did something other than jump?* It was like somebody sewed your arms where your legs were supposed to be, wasn’t it? It was somehow offensive, because the game designers had violated a set of cultural norms by mapping the buttons “wrong.” There’s often a subtle ergonomic reason that button is usually the “Jump” button, but it has just as much to do with user expectations.

In non-Deme news, we’re all excited to welcome our new Senior Aquarist, Colleen Newberg. She comes to us from Baltimore, but used to work next door at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. I learned last week that she is a Virginian, leaving Sid as the lone Yankee on our husbandry team. We’ve got some interesting things in the works, and Collen has been remarkably cool-headed amidst a torrent of exhibit ideas, new and changing protocols and plumbing eldritch and uncanny.

 

*I’ve personally observed that button-mapping has become less standardized as controllers have become more complex. I could be wrong, though—my gameplay habits do not constitute a large representative sample. Trigger buttons, of course, would be an exception.

Mics, and cameras and touch tanks, oh my!

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In the last couple of weeks Katie and I have been testing some options for capturing better quality visitor conversation for the camera system using external mics.

As Katie mentioned last month, each camera’s built-in microphones are proving to be a little unfruitful in capturing good quality audio for the eventual voice recognition system in “hot-spot” areas such as the touch tanks and front desk. As a result, we purchased some pre-amplified omni-directional microphones and set about testing their placement and audio quality in these areas. This has been no easy process, as the temporary wiring we put in place to hook the mics to the cameras is  not as aesthetically pleasing in a public setting as one might hope, and we discovered that the fake touch tank rocks are duct-tape’s arch enemy. Plus the mics have been put through their paces through various visitor kicks, bumps and water splashes.

As well as the issue of keeping the mics in place, testing has also meant a steep learning curve about mic level adjustment. When we initially wired them up, I adjusted each mic (via a mixer) one by one to reduce “crackly” noises and distortion during loud conversations. However, I later realized the adjustment overlooked necessary camera audio setup changes, and gain adjustments, affecting just how close a visitor has to get to one of the mics to actually hear them, particularly over the constant noise of running water around tanks.

So today I am embarking on a technical adventure. Wearing wireless headphones and brandishing a flathead screwdriver, I am going to reset all the relevant cameras’ audio settings to a zero gain, adjust the mic levels for mic balance (there are multiple mics per camera) rather than crackly noises, and adjust the gain until the sample audio I pull from the camera system comes out cleaner. I’m not expecting to output audio with the clarity of a seastar squeak, but I will attempt to get output that allows us to capture focal areas of clear conversation, even with the quietest of visitors. Avast me hearties, I be a sound buccaneer!