City as Learning Lab: Spreading Technological Fluency Through Creative Robotics
Pittsburgh has become home to an innovative experiment in which local communities creatively engage with robotic technologies for learning and change. The experiment began with Robot Diaries, a project in which female middle-school friend groups build robots for communication and creative expression. It continues with Neighborhood Nets, a program where neighbors participate in ongoing open studio sessions to discover their own innovative ways to use robotic sensing and imaging technology to identify data that helps them make arguments for urban planning and civic change in their local communities. Finally, it peaks when Robot 250 marks the 250th anniversary of the city with a series of workshops and open studios that enable the citizens of Pittsburgh to use robotic technologies to create public installations that creatively explore, document, interpret and express their material and social environment. As these related programs take root with diverse audiences and organizations in Pittsburgh, the city itself is becoming a learning lab in ways that transcend the individual contributions of any university, informal learning organizations, or community group. We are now using a leverage strategy to multiply the impact of this work by using new NSF funding to build a systematic research component to develop and document new measures of audience impact in technology experiences, identify features of university-community collaboration that facilitate sustainable community programs, and “shrink-wrap” a set of tools and resources that allow other cities to tailor creative robotics programs to their own unique audiences and needs.
Contact: Kevin Crowley (PI)
UPCLOSE people: Debra Bernstein; Laurie Giarrantani; Karen Knutson; Marti Louw; Sasha Palmquist; Maryann Steiner; Meryl Zwanger
Collaborators: Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology (Co-PI); Illah Nourbakhsh, Carnegie Mellon (Co-PI); Jennifer Russell, University of Pittsburgh
Links: City as Learning Lab; CREATE lab; GigaPan.org; Neighborhood Networks; Robot 250; Robot Diaries
Understanding the student and community impact of arts-based youth programs
UPCLOSE is working the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild on a three year project designed to assess the impact of its youth programs. The Manchester Craftsmen's Guild offers a nationally recognized afterschool arts program for youth that capitalizes on supporting the needs of urban youth within a context of strong arts-based studio experiences.
This project is not designed as a simple evaluation project, but rather we are interested in developing a collaborative relationship with Guild staff. This relationship— an ongoing iterative process of developing and refining research and evaluation objectives— promises to help the Guild to develop its in-house capacity to conduct and communicate ongoing evaluations of the impact of its youth programs. From this process UPCLOSE will be working to further refine its understanding on artistic learning in informal environments. In these evaluations we are looking at ways to capture both the disciplinary nature of learning in art, and looking at program development for youth.
Based on our preliminary conversations, this research and evaluation
partnership will focus on documenting the five outcomes of each of the MCG
Youth programs individually and collectively:
Contact: Karen Knutson
UPCLOSE people: Kevin Crowley; Laurie Giarratani; Megan Guise; Mary Ann Steiner
Links: Manchester Craftsmen's Guild
We are building informalscience.org for use by the informal learning community. This website is intended to be a place on the web where researchers, evaluators, and developers can find all that is currently known about how to conceptualize and assess informal learning in science and in other domains.
The purpose of the National Science Foundation-funded website, informalscience.org, is to promote and advance the field of informal learning in science and other domains. This site aims to support a community of learners, while being a place to share knowledge of informal science learning standards and practices.
Online survey results reveal that informalscience.org has a broad base of users. Respondents represented a variety of professions, including educators, evaluators, designers, administrators, students, producers and writers. Site visitors come from museums, university/independent research groups, and other types of organizations involved in informal learning (e.g., multimedia, design firms, afterschool programs).
Since its inception in 2002, the website has provided users with an annotated database of more than 2,500 citations, originally developed as part of the Museum Learning Collaborative. This website features links to information about evaluation practices and professional evaluators, as well as links to professional organizations, conferences, and university training.
As of 2004, users are able to post and electronically download front-end and summative evaluation studies. Individuals are also invited to submit new references to the database. The website is currently undergoing a large-scale redesign to better serve the informal learning community. The new informalscience.org will include thematic discussions, interviews with members of the field, active listservs, and electronic access to evaluation resources in informal environments.
Contact: Marti Louw
UPCLOSE people: Kevin Crowley; Catherine Eberbach; Karen Knutson
Links: InformalScience.org
The Ecology of Educational Opportunities in Pittsburgh
In our work with museums we continually see the influence and impact of K-12 policy on educational programs. We have watched with interest as museums have begun to design exhibits and field trip experiences to link up more directly with curriculum standards, and the recent flurry of "No Museums Left Behind" conferences suggest that the trend is increasing. The role of funders is also coming to our attention as recent initiatives highlight a shift in practice as funders strive to make their grantees more accountable for their outcomes. These trends led us to wonder about the intersections between funder, informal learning environments and the formal education system. We have designed a project with our colleagues at LRDC, Jennifer Russell an educational policy researcher, and Bill Bickel, a researcher interested in foundations and policy to look at these issues.
"The Ecology of Educational Opportunities in Pittsburgh" will examine how connections between the formal educational system and nonsystem actors such as informal education programs offered by museums and nonprofit organizations shape educational priorities and practices in the region. Prior educational research, including our own, has tended to look at the formal and informal worlds as separate educational systems. By mapping a regional education ecology we can look at issue, resource, and stakeholder inter-dependencies, and better understand the ways in which K-12 policy has ripple effects throughout the system. For example, Charter schools, home schooling, and the school improvement industry have begun to challenge our notions of what is a legitimate part of the K-12 system. Foundations play an important, though often invisible role, in shaping regional educational priorities. Through a set of strategically selected case studies of the relationship between the formal K12 system and informal education organizations, we will examine the following research questions: What connections between informal and formal education organizations currently exist and what are the opportunities for and barriers to robust collaboration? To what extent and how do the organizational structures and policies associated with the K-12 system shape the mission and practice of non-profits/community based organizations? To what extent and how does the presence of non-profits / informal education organizations shape the policies and practices in K-12 system?
Contact: Karen Knutson
UPCLOSE people: Kevin Crowley
Collaborators: Bill Bickel, University of Pittsburgh; Jennifer Russell, University of Pittsburgh
CAISE is a center, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), devoted to advancing and improving the practice of informal science education (ISE) in its many and varied forms — among them, film and broadcast media, science centers and museums, zoos and aquariums, botanical gardens and nature centers, digital media and gaming, and youth, community, and after-school programs. Founded in 2007, CAISE studies issues and trends in informal science education, documents the impact and value of ISE, offers professional development opportunities for those working with and seeking NSF support, and provides a collective voice for the field.
Contact: Kevin Crowley (Co-PI)
UPCLOSE people: Catherine Eberbach; Karen Knutson; Marti Louw; Mary Ann Steiner
Collaborators: Wendy Pollock, Association of Science and Technology Centers (PI); John Falk, Oregon State University (Co-PI); Alan Friedman, Visitor Studies Association (Co-PI); Ellen McCallie, CAISE Director; John Baek, CAISE Manager; et al.
Links: insci.org; UPCLOSE April 2008 Inquiry Group on Web-based Professional Development
Our longest museum research partnership has been with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. This is a unqiue relationship that began with intellectual synergy and is now sustained through a series of joint funding intiatives and organizaitonal links — UPCLOSE associate director Karen Knutson is the head of Research and Evaluation at the museum, and graduate student Camellia Sanford is the museum research fellow.
Through this research partnership we have been able to explore many different issues. An ethnography of the museum's expansion project
focused on leadership and organizational change as the museum worked to design its new "green" building, create a new town square model —
with other non-profit organizations moving in under its roof, including a Head Start program and a radio station, and to develop a
culture of experimentation, prototyping and data driven decision making in the redesign of exhibits and programs. This large scale
project will result in a book for museum professionals. Other projects with the museum have focused more internally, using our
research to help the museum develop, among other things, new exhibits, website games, a large NSF-funded traveling exhibition,
called How People Make Things. In other work with the museum we've jointly explored the role of parents in interactive experiences,
beliefs about art and art practice, creating a program to help support the development of parenting skills, and comparing the
outcomes of science-based exhibits and children's museum designed exhibits. The wonderful power and potential of our research
partnership with the Children's Museum has been recognized by the field, winning awards from the Association of Children's Museums, and the Association
of Science and Technology Centers.
Contact: Karen Knutson
UPCLOSE people: Kevin Crowley; Karen Knutson; Marti Louw; Camellia Sanford; Meryl Zwanger
UPCLOSE researchers collaborate with Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) exhibit designers, educators, and scientists to support the conceptual redesign of the museum’s exhibitions. We have worked on a variety of projects with the museum, including the Benedum Hall of Geology, the Hillman Hall of Gems and Minerals, the Fisher Scientific Biotechnology Lab, and distance education programs that brought the museum into contact with schools throughout West Virginia. But our longest and most fruitful collaboration with the museum has been around the redesign of their Dinosaur Hall. The original dinosaur hall housed a world famous collection of Mesozoic fossils, but did not provide much explanatory mediation. The new exhibition, Dinosaurs in Their Time, highlights the diversity of Mesozoic life forms, illustrates that dinosaurs co-existed with hundreds of plant and animal species, and provides rich mediation to support explanations about evolution. UPCLOSE graduate student Sasha Palmquist has been embedded throughout the design process, conducting basic research on audience understanding of dinosaurs and evolution, formative evaluation of signage and computer mediation, and will complete a summative evaluation in Summer 2008.
Contact: Kevin Crowley
UPCLOSE people: Laurie Giarrantani; Megan Guise; Karen Knutson; Sasha Palmquist