Oregon State University Free Choice Learning Lab

As the school year comes to an end so too do the school-based projects I evaluate. What this means, first and foremost, is a mad rush to collect data. It’s also a time for those involved in the project to come together and share what they’ve been doing for the past 8 months. As an evaluator, I have been focused on the mad rush of data collection – writing surveys, distributing surveys, leading focus groups, and conducting site observations. All of this data is needed to prove these projects are doing great things; however, what I truly love is hearing about the activities educators are using to engage their students in STE(A)M.

As an evaluator I have to ask: how do you capture the amazing ideas these educators are coming up with and how do you evaluate the impact they’re having? And by impact I mean both the impact on students and the impact on other educators who are hearing what’s been done in other educational settings. What I’m actually asking is how do you evaluate jaw-dropping moments?

To put these questions into some context I need to clarify that I am, from here on, talking about my experience as one of the evaluators with the Oregon Coast Regional STEM Education Center . The STEM Center is a collaboration between Lincoln County School District, Tillamook County School District, and countless institutions and organizations up and down the Oregon Coast. A U.S. Department of Education Math Science Partnership grant funds the STEM Center, which offers professional development to teachers in both school districts. Over the course of the school year the teachers put Project-Based Learning (PBL) into practice.

Now to turn back to the questions I asked above. How do you capture the amazing ideas these educators are coming up with? We do collect and archive as much as we can, specifically PBL overviews, PowerPoints, assessments, and other resources teachers and students use during PBL and include them all on the website for others to use. 2013-2014 school year PBLs should be up this summer but you can peruse 2012-2013 PBLs here.

Sean Bedell shows his colleagues a core sample he and his students took while looking for evidence of Oregon’s 1700 tsunami (project further discussed below).

How do you evaluate the impact these projects have? This question is more difficult to answer. For students, we distribute a STEM interest survey at the beginning and end of the school year and we use student test scores, but to me that can’t tell the whole story. The hard pill to swallow as an evaluator is that in order to capture what I would call the true impact on students and the whole story, this project would require longitudinal study (think 5 or 10+ years of collecting data and interviewing students). We also have teachers complete pre- and post-project surveys and have them write a reflection and those sources have proven to be useful in past projects to understand impact. We talked about running a focus group with the 2013-2014 STEM Center teachers to gauge how they incorporate all of the information delivered through professional development to plan and implement their PBLs. Anecdotal evidence shows that teachers are no longer taking a kit or pre-written lessons and using it as is in the classroom; instead, they are taking ideas from multiple sources and piecing together large scale projects. Essentially, their self-efficacy to do PBL and STE(A)M in the classroom is rising.

Most of the teachers presented their 2013-2014 PBL to their colleagues last Saturday. I was in the audience with my jaw on the floor for most of the day. I really appreciated the variety of presentations, which included posters, ignite presentations (i.e. short, sweet, and fast), and student voice-over presentations. In the afternoon some students came and presented PBLs from their perspective. I can’t cover all of the projects here and encourage any readers to keep checking the website as we add the 2013-2014 PBLs. Here’s a selection of projects that caught my attention:

– Students at Newport Prep Academy studied marbled murrelets and corvids, specifically how the latter prey on the former’s eggs. Human interference (i.e. leaving trash at picnic sites) brings corvids closer to marbled murrelets. Check out the Public Service Announcements produced by the students using iPads and iMovie. QR codes the students created will soon be at picnic areas of state and national parks.

– Students at Eddyville Charter School focused on tsunamis. They designed, built, and tested their own tsunami structure at Hinsdale Wave Research Lab. Students also researched the earthquake and tsunami that hit Oregon in 1700 by taking core samples at five different locations to look for tsunami evidence. Check out their website, which contains videos and student wikis about the project.

– At another school, students had to engineer a closed forest ecosystem to gain an understanding on how we could sustain life on another planet. This was definitely a test-retest project as students had to monitor pH and water levels to keep plants alive. Many students had to re-engineer their plans and use different materials to meet the challenge.

Examples of student-designed forest ecosystems.

– In Tillamook, elementary students were given a challenge by the local utility company, which was really a fake letter written by the teacher with the company’s approval. Students had to evaluate different sources of renewable energy and where such sources could be placed within the landscape to be most efficient. At the end of the PBL, students presented their findings to an expert panel.

See? Jaw on the ground! And this is just a sample of what these amazing teachers in Lincoln and Tillamook County School Districts are working on with their students!

This post may trigger some readers as it discusses a sensitive topic.

These days, I notice myself getting more caught up in news stories. I think it might even be at the point where I annoy people- well, at least my partner who brought my, ahem, possibly obsessive, behavior to my attention. As usual, I blame it on grad school- I just can’t stop thinking about things! The story that happened most recently is a hot button topic or even a trigger for some people, but I want to talk around it, so bear with me. As mentioned before, I live in Eugene. Recently it has come out that there was an “alleged” sexual assault involving a young woman and three young men from the University of Oregon basketball team. The story has been a bit sensationalized in the news and most of us probably know more details than we should about the story, but suffice it to say, it is very complicated, with a number of conflicting bits of information and the police decided there was not enough evidence to charge the males with any crime. I do still read the local paper (yay for me! I live in a town that still has an independent daily paper!) and followed the story as it spun out. I have two college age daughters, I am female, I was involved in rape prevention programs when I was in college (and yes, we did just bluntly call it that in the early 90’s)- I am a human being who wants everyone to be treated with dignity and respect and for the world to be a safe place! Let’s just say- I care.

In my (maybe obsessive) thinking about this story, I had a couple of thoughts that I trace directly to my newer academic perspective. A photo from the paper, with a young woman holding up a sign stating “I live in a rape culture” really struck me and I started to think about what that really means. As I become more enmeshed in a socio-cultural perspective, I look at the world differently than I used to, and I wish there were spaces I had to really talk about things like “rape culture” in frank ways. There is so much going on here- the ways our culture talks about sex and sexuality and the ways it portrays it. The way bodies are displayed in advertising and how songs and television and movies show relationships seems to blur boundaries. What does personal responsibility look like for all parties (and how do we start that conversation without it sounding like victim blaming or slut shaming)? The way our culture glorifies sports figures and seems to have a separate code of behavior for them is tied in to this particular scenario too. And then there is the whole issue of rape and consensual sex. One of my insights from this latest story is that I believe we need a better, expanded vocabulary around these concepts. While most of us intellectually know that rape is not “just” a stranger forcing someone through violence or threat of violence to engage in sexual activity, I think that emotionally, that is how most of us think of it. When you add in underage drinking, previous sexual relations between the individuals, and a sense that “this is what college parties are like”, the waters are muddied. This does not excuse wrong behavior, but I think it lets people feel that they have not committed a wrongful act. The young men say they thought it was consensual- and the sad thing is, I believe them, they probably did think so. They do not see themselves as rapists. The messages they get from the culture they are surrounded by are confusing enough when you aren’t 19 and drunk. The story is just sad from start to finish, and 4 people’s lives (plus their families and friends too!) are forever changed by one night of lack of clear communication and awful choices.

So, the question becomes, how do we change this culture to one that is not a “rape culture”. How do we have visions of equality and safety for all that are brought in to reality? How do we change the ways we talk about sex and sexuality, in the moment and out of it? How do we change our beliefs that if someone isn’t saying “yes” it means “no”? If the dominant image we hold of a rapist is someone holding a knife to their victim, the individuals at a party who are pressuring someone won’t take on that label and recognize the consequences of their actions.

I am ready to help bring that world into being!

This summer my research will start on visitor use of the touchtable. I have been looking for content that is relevant and engaging beyond sorting or scanning through a collection of images. Many of the programs utilize these tasks and I am seeking something a bit more robust. Finding software that is coded in a way that will run on an oversized “tablet” and apply to a public informal learning environment seems to be a unique combination.

Being new to the world of communicating science via exhibits, there is a lot to learn about the integration of physical, personal, and sociocultural dimensions within an informal learning environment. If we are using technology as a medium for an exhibit, what can make it an engaging exhibit beyond the table itself? Research on visitor interaction with exhibits has advanced immensely in recent decades. One of the first papers I read in this area was Bitgood’s 1987 article on “Principles of Exhibit Design” in Visitor Behavior. Bitgood outlines aspects of exhibit design that influence viewing time. Some of these factors involve appealing to the senses or by using motion, where the object is placed, or how “real” it looks, and whether it facilitates personal meaning and social interaction between visitors. This last concept is particularly relevant to the touchtable as that it allows for multiple users at once, but if crowding occurs, that may influence the overall visitor experience. It is a fine balance!

So putting my software design cap on and thinking aloud for a moment… If I had access to a program I could install on the touchtable today, it would be formatted in a way that the public could interact with data to generate models or create visuals. For example, giving access to a dataset that can be manipulated and then transformed into something visually meaningful to the visitor. What might this look like? It might be a graph or some other creative means to represent their interpretation of the data. At OSU, there are so many different forms of data coming out of Hatfield alone, how might we allow a visitor the chance to make meaning from it? If there was a way for them to share this interpretation, how might it compare with what other visitors have created? Hmmm, I could be creating a future project for myself…I will continue to play detective as I search out what is useful for our environment at this time and for my project. Curious to hear what others might have to say about science “apps” or educational software for the museum setting. Feel free to share!

Seven months ago I joined Twitter. Now I want to reflect on that decision. In my post I claimed that Twitter has changed language use and what I meant by “language” at the time was what I would call grammar, or certain rules that we have in place for language. Today, seven months later, I still support that general claim. However, I don’t think Twitter has changed the wider use or rules of language; instead, what it has done is create a language and rules within Twitter that may or may not work outside of that interface. For instance, it would sound rather peculiar if we actually said “RT” or “MT” when we shared or modified someone’s ideas aloud.

What I mean is that content within Twitter is tied to a specific context, the Twitter interface, and is therefore contextualized. The content, however, is not tied just to the interface but is also tied to the person who originally posted the tweet. Any Twitter user knows what happens next. The tweet gets responses sent directly to the original publisher, it gets re-tweeted by a person to all of their followers and/or it gets marked as a favorite.

As soon as this process begins the content starts to become decontextualized. The idea or content embedded within the tweet also becomes a dialogue opposed to the monologue that it started as. The difference, of course, between monologue and dialogue is that there is one voice in the former and multiple voices in the latter. What I find interesting, though, is that tweets can move from a monologue to a dialogue back to a monologue if we think of a monologue not only as having one voice but also as internalizing an idea and making it our own.

What I am describing is a theoretical approach to an issue, the thoughts of which originated after reading a blog post by James Hayton. He wrote,

“…because everything is limited to 140 characters, conversations about complicated topics become reduced to soundbites devoid of any subtlety of meaning. I write a 1000-word blog post on skill development in writing, and I get a 140-character reply saying ‘get words down and worry later’. It makes me want to beat my head against the desk.”

How can I write about Twitter and linguistics and discourse analysis all in one blog post? Consider a tweet an utterance. Better yet, pretend you’re a linguist and refer to it as an utterance proper.

If we were to analyze tweets, what would we define as an utterance? As the picture shows, every utterance proper is responsive and anticipatory. It responds to a previous action or idea and anticipates an answer or justification. We can think of the entire diagram as one utterance so it’s not solely the original tweet, but also the ideas that came before and the responses to that tweet. The utterance changes only when the theme or topic changes.

My reflection after seven month comes down to this: As an academic I can overthink and evaluate the whole process. However, Twitter is a tool that has many benefits when properly used. It has a language of it’s own that one must learn and internalize but once that language is internalized you can gain meaningful connections and participate in meaningful conversations.

When I posted this blog, embedded software automatically generated a tweet using the first hundred or so characters, added a link to this page, and publish it to our @FreeChoiceLab Twitter account. That tweet then enters numerous timelines of our fans and followers who are welcome to follow the link and read what I’ve written. If they should like what they read, they may be so inclined to share the original tweet with their fans and followers, who then have the opportunity to read, enjoy, and share the original tweet, or an officially retweeted version.

By “officially retweeted” I mean something very specific. The sharer can use the retweet function built into Twitter, causing the original tweet to appear in their timeline with “SharerName retweeted” added to the top. Alternately, the sharer may copy the tweet, paste it into new tweet under their own name, and add “RT @OriginalPoster:” to the beginning. Both of these methods attribute the original author of the tweet. To put it in academic language, the original author has been cited. However, when a person decides to share a tweet by copying the content and reposting it under their own name, with no attribution to the original author, that’s plagiarism. Or, more accurately, Twagiarism.

On the surface, it may seem that Twagiarism is kind of a non-issue. After all, Twitter is all about sharing, using the creativity-inspiring limit of 140 characters. If I tweet “I had a great week, procrastinated myself into super organization” what’s the harm if someone else who also procrastinated posts an identical tweet after reading mine? The problem is that while there is a lot of innocent, banal content shared on twitter, there is also more serious content, and it’s all considered intellectual property of the original writer. And because there’s no easy way to categorize whether something is frivolous, or perhaps the next famous quote, Twitter has a very specific policy regarding copyright infringement (fancy legalese for plagiarism). Item 9 of the Twitter terms of service states:

“Twitter respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects users of the Services to do the same.”

What this means is that whatever a person posts is the intellectual property of the one who posted it, and Twitter expects its users to respect that. Users who violate this term are subject to having the content removed, and in extreme cases Twitter reserves the right to terminate a user’s account.

In academia, use of social media is on the rise. Institutions have official twitter accounts, managed by one person or a team, and the tweets represent the interests of the institution. The same goes for groups, labs, and individuals who have professionally linked Twitter accounts. What may not be immediately recognized is that every tweet is, technically, a publication. It might not be the peer reviewed kind typically associated with academic publications, but they have the same protection, and the authors have the same rights. There’s also more at stake if a person tweeting for an institution engages in twagiarism, because what the world sees is the institution they represent engaging in unethical practices. Isolated incidents of twagiarism can often be dealt with by educating the individual or group about proper retweeting practices. Repeat offenders are when having a specific, well-planned policy comes in handy.

Oregon State University currently does not have a policy regarding plagiarism specific to social media, but they do have a policy on more traditional forms of plagiarism. Only time will tell if this is sufficient protection, or if there needs to be a specific policy. Twitter is fundamentally social, and if hashtage trends are any indication, even the smallest, seeming inconsequential thing can suddenly be a global trend. Considering that the reputation of respected institutions is impacted by acts of Twagiarism, an in house policy may be an important line of defense against public castigation.

So please, if you’re going to share the tweet for this article, retweet it using the button Twitter provides, or adding RT manually when you share it.

Well, I tried to post this as a response to Jen Wyld’s post on her recent Science Pub experience,

but the blog’s comments section isn’t working for me at the moment. So, I’m back to make an unscheduled guest post. I guess that means I should make it a little more substantial than it was. Here’s the original comment text:

“Hi Jen, I’m hoping to get more into research around these types of events. We recently had a forum for the students in the College of Agriculture around GMOs, too, and I heard many of the same arguments for (suppressing bad genes, golden rice) and then a little bit of advocacy at the end for GMOs.

The interesting thing I’ve learned lately is that GMOs aren’t really a big risk in the public’s mind, according to Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/1/21/mapkia-episode-31-answer-culturally-programmed-risk-predispo.html

At the very least, it’s not a left-right split like some contorversial issues (climate change) are.

Anyway, I have a question about the event itself; was there facilitated discussion amongst the attendees, or was it more of a “lecture in public” with traditional Q&A? The ones here in Gainesville are super popular with a certain crowd; the RSVP list fills fast and often with the same folks regularly!”

Blog readers may know I’m now at the University of Florida building my research program around science communication and public engagement with science. The ideas of risk perception and cultural cognition are ones I’ve been exploring lately as I get to expand beyond my dissertation work. Dan Kahan has recently made a couple of really important methodological points for those of us working in these areas, which I think also point to the importance of the work the Free-Choice Learning Lab does in particular with users in the real world:

1. Trust but verify, aka check your assumptions – the example of GMOs is an important lesson about transfer; just because we think that GMOs are a controversial issue, doing real work with real people shows their ideas may not stack up to media hype:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/3/10/who-fears-what-why-trust-but-verify.html

2. Just out: we need to get out of the lab and study real people, getting empirical data about the models we’ve developed of how communication happens:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/4/18/want-to-improve-climate-science-communication-i-mean-really.html

I’ve been enjoying the positive reception I have been getting about my work from my new colleagues. Here’s to even more work with real people, messy and frustrating as it may be. Case in point: when you plan data collection on the one day the museum doesn’t have an event and you can get your schedule and your volunteer researchers’ schedules to match, then show up to campus only to find out a) your men’s basketball team is playing in the Sweet Sixteen at noon, b) there is another event at the Stadium as you start your drive to the museum on the other side of campus, c) there is a softball game just across the street from the museum, and d) there is also an event at the Performing Arts Center RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the museum. We couldn’t even park ourselves, let alone leave space for our potential research participants. Sheesh.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

How to Evaluate Jaw-Dropping STE(A)M Project-Based Learning

Only Shades of Gray

Envisioning an educational app for the FCL environment

It’s a bird! It’s a tweet! It’s an utterance!?!

Twagiarism: Yeah, there’s a word for it

A comment on GMOs and perception of Risk

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