Emlyn Koster
Welcome to today’s two-part session on "Innovative Projects: Public Engagement of Science. " Part 1 will go from now, 9:00, to 11:30, Part 2 from 1:00 to 3:30 this afternoon. Each of these two parts will have eight featured presentations of ten minutes, duration.
Good morning, I’m Emlyn Koster. I’m pleased to be the moderator of these two sessions. I’m the President and CEO of Liberty Science Center, which opened in 1993 and which is reopening this summer after a $109 million dollar expansion and renewal project to hopefully transform both our institution, as I think it will, as well as to serve as an example to the field of science centers that the relevance of our institutions to matters of science and society both locally and globally can be incrementally advanced.
I’d like to commend JoAnna Baldwin Mallory, Hyman Field, and Graham Farmelo for their design and assembly of this very attractive conference. I mentioned to them when I was asked to play this role, and they agreed, I believe, that we all belong, each of us, to various specific professional associations and each of those, whatever they may be in our own field, has its annual conference, maybe two, per year that draws upon our resources, time and money, as well as our contributions. I think the speakers and delegates at this conference are proof positive that we are ready, willing, and able to convene at other times in a trans-disciplinary manner, and I therefore would like to advocate that we do so more often, both by encouraging our own discipline’s specific associations to take multi-disciplinary program initiatives and by supporting independent convenings such as this one.
Perhaps you might agree with this point, too, that although there are a lot of us here, each category of delegate in the room, as we all assembled for the plenary sessions yesterday afternoon, is probably wondering why more of their disciplinary colleagues are not here to share in the front line of thinking about this discourse of bridging the gap between science and society. I know I am for my respective field of science centers. This conference program has been mostly built of invited speakers.
This two-part session today on innovative public engagement practices in the making will bring together speakers from both Europe and North America. It was built from a competitive process last fall. Many of you maybe received the call for submissions, some eighty were received and they were reviewed by a distinguished international panel. Submissions were required to be explicit about their project’s goal, their strategy, and their demographics. In other words, the why, the how, and the for whom. And I think you’ll hear each of our speakers today address those rhetorical questions. The variety of 16 presentations today that were the final selection were deemed to be the most valuable for us to hear about and I hope you enjoy and we all learn from their remarks.
The format of the session, both this morning and I think also this afternoon, we, the eight of them and myself, have just agreed to alter what was the plan until this morning, which was to have each ten-minute presentation followed by a five-minute opportunity for the hearing of improvement suggestions of an effectiveness nature from you in the room. We’ve decided that it would be more efficient and maybe more iterative across the presentations if we ask you to listen to the sequence of eight ten-minute presentations first and then have a larger, longer, up to forty-minute iterative interaction with you at the end of those. And that’s what we have decided to do. At the end of the talks, in about 40 minutes or so time, please do use a microphone, identify yourself and then offer your suggestion or remark or question. We’re looking for more comments than questions, in a concise manner.
I’ll now proceed to introduce the first of our speakers, who comes to us locally from Boston here. Julie Benyo is the Director of Education Initiatives for WGBH. She oversees the development and implementation of national education initiatives for broadcast and multimedia projects. She works with series such as NOVA and Evolution and creates non-broadcast multi-media initiatives such as Extraordinary Women Engineers. Julie is responsible for establishing partnerships with formal and informal educators and educational groups nationwide and works with outside evaluators to assess project impacts. Julie received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA and Ph.D. from the State University of New York in Albany. Before coming to WGBH, she was involved in both formal and informal education at a number of institutions, including Boston’s Museum of Science, Loyola University in Chicago, Harvard University, and the University of Connecticut. Please join me in welcoming to the podium Julie Benyo, who will speak on the Design Squad: Getting Kids Excited About Engineering.
Julie Benyo
At WGBH, we first partnered with the American Society for Civil Engineers back in the nineties when we did a mini-series called Building Big with David MaCauley. At that time we found engineers to be such an eager and committed group that we wanted to find additional ways to work with them. And we have over the years. But we realized that what was missing from the broadcast landscape was a show for middle schoolers that specifically spoke to engineering. There were some shows and series for math and science, but there really wasn’t anything that elevated engineering to its own place. And that was the genesis of Design Squad.
Design Squad will premiere on PBS in February of this year during National Engineers Week. And we have an initial 13 half-hour episodes. There are two 20-something engineers that serve as hosts and there are eight cast members between the ages of 15 and 18. The target audience is middle-school viewers, but we know that kids like to view up, and so the cast is a little bit older. Each week they’re divided into two teams, and the teams are shuffled each week, and they take on different challenges. For example, a women’s collective in Haiti asked the group to design a device that would grind peanuts into peanut butter. And the winning prototype that came out of the two challenges was actually manufactured by a local manufacturer and the women’s collective in Haiti is currently using it.
The goal is to showcase engineering in ways you wouldn’t normally think of engineering. In addition to the challenges, each episode has a video profile of a real engineer doing real engineering. There are two guys from Burton Snowboard, there’s an ice cream engineer from Ben and Jerry’s who determines how many mix-ins go into a pint, and so the shows really try to showcase engineering as a creative design process. The Web site is rich and robust. All of the episodes are streamed or will be streamed on the Web site, as well as the video profiles, and there’s an e-zine, kind of an Engineers Without Borders, again that showcases engineers doing really interesting things all around the world.
There’s an outreach campaign in which we’re working with some great groups to really spread uniform messages about engineering and to distribute resources on engineering, too, that can be used by engineers, informal educators, teachers, and a wide range of others. We have an event guide, that I have one example of here, but you can go on our Web site and request it. It’s free and it shows you how to do events. We also have an educators guide that’s currently at the printer and that, too, will be free and downloadable from our Web site. So let’s take a sneak peak.
Thanks. The goal is to really get kids to develop habits of mind using the design process. And here’s the design process sketch here and I think you can see that it’s explicitly shown in every episode with the words on screen-- "test, " "design, " "brainstorm "—so that it’s explicitly reinforced each time. And activities on the Web site and the event guide and the educator guide all reinforce these steps in the design process.
As I mentioned, the project really is a collaboration and we are working with a number of outreach partners. We’re working with educational groups such as the ASCE, IEEE, NSBE, SWE, all the "E’s "--we’re working with them. We’re working with university groups such as Tufts and Purdue, industry like Intel, Northrop Grumman, and informal and other educational groups like the Boston Museum of Science, other museums, boys and girls clubs, Girl Scouts, and others. The Web site has a full list of partners, and if you or any of your organization or any organizations you know of may want to become a partner, please check out the Web site, send us feedback, and find out how.
We’re also doing some big high-profile events around the country and here are just a few of the places that we’re going, but this event guide that we’ve developed allows engineers and educators to do events of all scales, from a library to a community center to perhaps a church basement. And these events are educational events, they’re meant to excite kids and get them to watch the show, to go online, to do the activities that an educator in the educator guide can continue to use.
We’re also going around the country doing trainings—training educators, training engineers how to work with kids. Engineers are eager and enthusiastic and committed, but they don’t always know what to do and sometimes they get in their own way with the things that they do, so we’re training them how to work with kids, giving them some exciting activities to do, showing them how to model the design process and inquiry-based learning as they’re going along. And as I said, this is a "train-the-trainer " model, so we have done this successfully on other projects and are confident that we’ll have some success with this as well.
There are a lot of ways to get involved. While Design Squad premieres on TV during National Engineers Week, we really want to send out the message that engineering is a 52-week-a-year endeavor and that there are lots of ways to get involved. We provide the educators guide, we provide the event guide, and lots of technical support from WGBH. Everything’s online and we’re only a phone call away for folks.
And finally, I just want to give a big shout out to our funders, without whom this wouldn’t be possible, as all of you who do educational projects know. So thank you for your time, and during the Q & A, maybe you’ll have some ideas for other ways we can spread the word in engineering as a creative, really fascinating way to turn ideas into reality. Thank you.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you very much, Julie. You had eight seconds left on your timer. That was impeccable. See what you can do with ten minutes?
Number two. Roger Bernier is the senior advisor for scientific strategy and innovation at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, in Atlanta. He has worked in public health for more than thirty years at the local, national, and international levels, beginning in 1966 with a CDC assignment to the New York City Department of Health and subsequently with assignments in Niger in West Africa and at Atlanta. He rejoined CDC in 1978 as an epidemic intelligence service officer and was assigned to the Division of Immunization where he has assumed positions of increasing responsibility. Roger obtained his masters in public health from Yale and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1978. He is the author and co-author of some eighty scientific articles and publications on vaccines and vaccine-preventable disease topics, serves on several committees of advisory groups as both a member and chair and has received several awards for both scientific and public-health contributions during his career. In 2004 Roger completed a special assignment to explore how the immunization community could increase public participation in decision making about vaccines. Since that time, he has focused his professional work on enhancing public engagement in public health at CDC. And since 1980 Roger has been the editor and publisher of the Epidemiology Monitor, a monthly subscription-based newsletter for epidemiologists. Please welcome Roger Bernier, "A Model for Citizen and Stakeholder Engagement in Science Policymaking. "
Roger Bernier
Good morning, everyone. The pressure’s on; I’ve got ten minutes so hang with me. I want to begin by saying how I got into public engagement. It’s not the typical activity for scientists in my position. My wake-up call came during a congressional hearing on the relationship between vaccines and autism when one of the advocates said to me, "Your CDC research is dead on arrival. " And that phrase was a wake-up call for me to say that basically we were not going to solve this problem with collecting more data and doing more research, that we had a relationship issue with some segments of the population, that this was a trust issue, and that we needed to do something different if we were to going to address this problem. I think the therapy or the treatment for this is that not only do you have to get the science right, but you have to get science policies that actually reflect the values that are important in our society. So public engagement became a strategy as a way of building trust and working together with the public to build a better relationship and more trust.
This slide gives a definition or a concept about public engagement. As you can see, it’s not one thing. It exists on a continuum, basically at that this point, where it’s more a one-way transfer of information. You’re the government here and you have some information that you know the public needs. You’re not really interested in talking to them about it or discussing it, you just really want them to have the information. Over here, you want some feedback from the public. You may have a questionnaire or a fact sheet or something and you’d like to get their input to see if you’ve got the concept right or you’ve got the right tone or you’re culturally sensitive. You do want to get a little input but perhaps not a whole lot.
Over here you’re more involved in a kind of a two-way conversation where you want feedback, you don’t really know what the right answer is completely, and you really genuinely want to have involvement with both parties. Over here it’s kind of a collaboration where there’s joint decision making, perhaps sharing of resources, and over here the government may actually delegate to the public some of the decisions that it wants to make. I understand that happens around certain environmental issues. The point is there’s no right way or wrong way, these are all appropriate in different circumstances, but our agency has traditionally operated down at this end. And the whole purpose of the project was to try to get the agency to operate more in the middle and move from left to right because in some circumstances this kind of participation in the agency’s work is trust-building and is probably the appropriate thing to do.
So one shorthand way to think about this public engagement at level three or so is as collaborative problem solving or as shared decision making. I’d like to think of it as a kind of co-creation of a solution, but it’s more than just consultation, it’s actual participation. What it’s not—this is helpful for some people to understand—it’s not just one-way transfer of information. It’s not advertising where you’re trying to persuade or sell a particular product, and it’s not public relations where you’re trying to sell a particular policy decision.
Not everybody thinks this is a great idea. Here’s a cartoon showing how putting science in the hands of the public is how some view this and they see that we could have a situation where everyone would have his own version of the science. And I won’t read all this but one of the characters is saying, "Evolution never did happen, not in my family anyway. " Someone else is saying, "Mercury poisoning is not really such a big problem. " But the fun thing here on the bottom, there’s a little comment from the cartoonist, "Will real science still be there when you need it? "
Why would you do this? You talked about the questions. My presentation could be understood as, What is it, Why do it, and How might you do it? Well, I’ve just tried to give you a feeling for what it is. Why should we do public engagement? I think it all boils down to three reasons. It’s the right thing to do in a democratic society. We believe that people should have a say over decisions that affect their lives. It’s the best thing to do; this is the "two heads are better than one " idea, the way you get substantively better decisions. But in a science agency combining two heads, when one is a lay-head and one is a science-head, it’s not always an easy sell, and I can answer questions about that if you’d like. But just to say that this is a tough argument to make sometimes with scientists. And finally, the argument which most people will understand is that if you do this and involve people, you get more buy-in for the decisions that you make, possibly more support.
Okay, well, we know what it is, we know why we might do it. How might we do something like this? What we wanted to do is engage the public on a science policy issue that has a values component. It’s not a 100 percent technical issue but it has a values component, the thinking being that the public has expertise on what their values are. Who are the experts on values? It’s the people who have the values.
So one of the science policy questions that we were facing is how are we going to use a limited supply of influenza vaccine in the first six months of a pandemic when we won’t have enough for everybody. Who’s going to get it? This is a policy question, and it’s not purely scientific. So the goal was to rank order the goals and objectives that we might have as a society for a pandemic flu program. The question was who first to vaccinate against pandemic influenza when vaccine supplies are limited at the outset. And, as it turned out, it was not anything that we had designed, but there was an expert process going on simultaneously. We use a networking approach, this is a list of the different participants and you can see, we had approximately a dozen different organizations that were working with us in one way or another.
But what actually did we do? We can understand the project in terms of five phases. Initially a framing exercise by stakeholders. These are people who represent specific organizations with an interest in this question, but they’re not lay people or citizens at large. For that, we got citizens’ input on a Saturday, a whole day, where citizens at large came together to talk about this, approximately a hundred in size. Then after it had been framed by the stakeholders, the stakeholders met twice to consider the input from the citizens and to make up their own minds on these questions. Once they had a decision, we took it out to other citizens in different parts of the country on a Saturday for a half day where they were able to see what decisions had been made by this group and to react to those decisions. Then the stakeholders integrated this feedback, and finally we prepared our report.
Just to give you an idea of how many people were involved, as I said, in the first one, in Atlanta, there were about a hundred people, and these were the numbers in the four other parts of the country. We tried to do it in the major corners of the country. These are some of the interests that were represented in the stakeholders: health professionals, vaccine companies, consumer advocates, minority groups, and there were probably overall maybe a dozen different stakeholder interests.
What was the work that they had to do? Well, basically, there was a learning part where they had sort of Pandemic Influenza 101 for the first part of the morning. There was framing work that had to be done to understand what are the real goals to put on the table for discussion. There were small group discussions of approximately ten people per table, and then there was a period where there was a weighing of the pros and cons of pursuing each of these goals, and finally, making a choice.
What were the goals that people were asked? I’ll go through them quickly. Give everyone an equal chance of being vaccinated such as that you might do in a lottery, or we should do first-come-first-serve. We should protect those who have the most life left, i.e., young people. We should protect first those who are most likely to die because of pre-existing conditions. We should first ensure public safety by vaccinating the people who ensure public safety. We should maintain emergency or life-saving services by protecting those people first; protect key leaders of society; protect those who provide services which keep society running like power, electricity, transportation, food distribution; give vaccine to other countries as a humanitarian goal; protect those who provide homeland security and military personnel and those who ensure vaccine production. So hopefully you’ve all made your own first choices here.
What were results? They grouped them into two major goals. The first goal was to ensure the functioning of society. It was considered the most important thing. Second, to reduce individual deaths and hospitalizations due to influenza. But people were very very concerned that every Tom, Dick, and Harry would want to say, "Well, my job is essential. I ensure the functioning of society, " so they wanted to make sure that we accomplish goal number one by using the minimum number of doses necessary and not using one dose too much so that we could quickly get on with goal number two, which was to protect people who are at high risk.
The other goals, the lottery idea—first-come-first-serve and vaccinating of children—received much, much lower priority. Interestingly, experts who were deliberating separately gave more weight to number two so that you had citizens putting more weight on this goal and experts putting more weight on that goal. Dr. Gerberding made reference to that last night, an interesting distinction.
What’s our conclusion, the impact rather? In November of 2005 the results of the policy came out. They didn’t put out the agreement that we had reached but they did make a statement in the policy that the government at HHS has recently initiated outreach. A theme that has emerged is the importance of limiting the effects of a pandemic on society by preserving essential societal functions. This is one measure that we had that we were heard.
The conclusion is that public engagement is possible and useful on a substantive decision involving values tradeoffs. In this case, the collective wisdom placed greater weight on assuring the functioning of society than did expert advisory groups. There’s been some traction for this idea at CDC where we have used it now for another project where there are also values issues. That has to do with community-control measures. We’re going to have to make tradeoffs when pandemic influenza strikes about closing schools, canceling mass events. How willing is the population to endure these social disruptions in order to slow the spread of the disease. So we consulted with the public on that.
There’s been a goals development at CDC that has tried to use this public engagement and there’s another project on the same topic that I just discussed with you that’s in the works and we plan to see if we can implement this model not only at the federal level, but if it’s a good idea for federal decision makers, maybe it can be useful to state-level decision makers as well.
And my final slide is one of my favorite quotes in this area. "When big things are at stake, the danger of error is great. Therefore, many should discuss and clarify the matter together so that the correct way may be found. " And one of the things that I always find amazing about this was the date on the bottom, which was a Buddhist emperor in 604 AD was credited with that comment. Thank you very much for your attention.
Emlyn Koster
As you hear each of these presentations and you think about the remarks or suggestions you might want to make at the end, I’d encourage us all to think about the broader applications of either competition or communication protocol, for example, as two of the broader points out of these first two presentations.
So from WGBH to the CDC, we now go to Chattanooga, Tennessee, Erica Brandon. The third speaker is the science manager at the Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga. As the science manager, Erica’s role is to develop content material for the science areas through creating program materials which include science demonstrations, involvement with special projects, and collaborations with the Chattanooga community.
Erica graduated from the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga with a bachelor of science in environmental science, biology; spent the last seven years working in various experiential education-related fields, including outdoor and adventure education. In her current role as science manager, Erica is working on several exciting projects including partnerships with Chattanooga-area schools, the Chattanooga Engineers Club, and the Kruesi Center for Innovation. Through her work she hopes to make science more approachable for the public and to encourage parents and children to not only get involved in science, but also to get excited about becoming part of the scientific community. Her presentation is entitled, "The Tyner Science Troupe: Creating Excitement about Science in Local Public Schools. " Please welcome Erica Brandon.
Erica Brandon
I’m very excited to be here today to share with you guys the work that we are doing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to help lessen the gap between science and society. Tyner Science Troupe is the way that we are approaching lessening that gap. We are trying to get teenage high school members excited about science by making them teachers as well as learners of science. The goals of Science Troupe are twofold.
Well, actually, let me go back. Science Troupe is a collaboration between the Creative Discovery Museum and Tyner Academy. Creative Discovery Museum is a hands-on children’s museum whose mission is to create an excitement for learning with interactive exploration. The science museum has been around for about ten years, and we serve two hundred thousand people a year. Tyner Academy is a magnet school in Hamilton County, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and they provide focus in three academies in the school. These are math, science, and technology. Tyner is pretty unique as a public high school because they have a commitment to trying innovative teaching methods, which is why we were able to collaborate and create this program with them.
The program itself is Tyner Science Troupe, and it is a for-credit course for juniors and seniors in the high school, and they are able to develop and teach science programs to local elementary schools. The goals of the Science Troupe are twofold. Science Troupe itself, the students, receive a lot of benefits from enrolling in this course. They learn how to research and write science programs, they are actually doing the research and the writing of these programs themselves. They also learn public-speaking skills. So they learn how to get up, not only in front of elementary school students but also their peers and adults at the Creative Discovery Museum. So they’re learning very important communication skills that often get overlooked in high school. They’re also obtaining a high school credit. I think this is one of the most unique aspects of this program, because through a collaboration, this course actually fulfils a requirement for a role in the science academy, and the science academy is nationally recognized certification so they are receiving a very good course there at the school.
They also receive specialized training, inventive thinking, brainstorming, communication skills, and drama role playing. So through a science course, they’re receiving all of these different skills that are actually going to help them acquire jobs when they leave. As many of us know, the way to learn science is to teach science. So we’re kind of getting these kids, almost tricking them into learning the science because they’re learning it to teach the other kids. And it makes them excited about a program that otherwise might not seem too accessible to them.
Not only does the Science Troupe benefit, but the Creative Discovery Museum benefits from this program, too. We are able to reach an underrepresented audience in the sciences. The majority of the students that enroll in this course are girls and minorities. And so we’re making science more appealing to them by changing the focus from learning the science to teaching the science. We’re also able to provide quality programs to elementary schools. Since the Science Troupe goes to the schools close to their high school, we’re reaching an audience that maybe couldn’t come to the museum, and they’re getting museum-quality programming. We’re also able to expand to a teenage audience. Creative Discovery Museum is a children’s museum. Our focus is up to about twelve years of age. Unfortunately, you lose a lot of students past that point. So this allows us to expand to that teenage audience, and we also maintain our commitment to the younger minds.
We’re excited about a unique and valuable collaboration with the Tyner Academy and we’re also receiving a valuable program for our museum audience because the Science Troupe comes there to present there, too.
How does Science Troupe work? The students actually fill out an application and they go through an interview process in order to become members of the Science Troupe. They also are in charge of writing their own lesson plans and doing their own research. They’re given a topic, we align the topics with what the elementary schools are teaching for that semester, and the students then research and they come up with hands-on applications of this subject to teach in the classroom. They go to two local elementary schools that are in close proximity to the high school and they teach third-and fourth-grade classes the lessons that they have learned. And then at the end of the semester they usually come to the Creative Discovery Museum and they’ll actually present demonstrations that they pick out and that they design to our general audience. So they might be hitting school groups or teachers, home-school students, a wide variety of an audience at CDM.
All right. So here’s just a picture of a couple of classes that we’ve had at Tyner High School, and it’s just an idea that these are students, these are junior and high school students. They’re getting ready to go into college, trying to decide what they want to do in life. We get them into this course because it’s different. When we ask them, "Why do you enroll in Science Troupe? " They say, "Because it sounded like fun. It’s different from my other classes. We actually get to go out and do something new. " So they’re very excited about this program, instead of just thinking they’re going to be sitting in the classroom, taking notes, and then taking a test.
Who is reached by Science Troupe? That’s an excellent question, because it reaches a whole lot of people. The high school students are reached by Science Troupe. As I already stated, they are excited about it. Some of them have heard about the class from friends that took it the year before and it sounds like fun to them, it sounds like a neat way to learn some science, to get a science credit, like I said, without having to sit in the classroom. The elementary school students are so excited when Tyner Science Troupe comes. When they present at elementary schools I try to go to help observe, evaluate, give feedback. And it makes my day, it just makes my day. The students HYPERLINK "mailto:edb@cdmfun.org" are so excited, they are smiling, they’re happy, they’re raising their hand, they’re shouting out answers, they’re just having a great time learning science. So it’s wonderful to see science presented in a way that is getting these children excited.
The general admission audience at CDM, when Tyner Science Troupe comes to the Creative Discovery Museum and these teachers with their school groups see it, the parents see it, all of them have comments to make about how wonderful this program is. They want to know more details about it. We even have people asking if the Science Troupe members are looking for jobs because they’re thinking that they would work really well with other programs. Educators also benefit from seeing the Science Troupe because they learn a new way to present science. Teachers that have been teaching for years say, "Hey, I never thought about that before. I never thought to teach science this way. Look at how excited my kids are. This is great. " And so it helps give them a new perspective on teaching.
The future of Science Troupe, we’re hoping that we can expand Science Troupe. We’re looking at possibilities for funding because there is quite a bit of time commitment for staff. Also we think that if we had funding, there would be more opportunities for the Science Troupe students. Sometimes transportation can be an issue. So we would have a way to make sure they get to the schools and maybe even could go to more schools if we had a secured source for transportation. We could expand the program to other schools and even other disciplines. So there are lots of possibilities for the Science Troupe.
Science Troupe is important because it provides future educators with a science background. A lot of the students enroll in Science Troupe because they do plan to teach or to go into an education career, and this gives them a solid background in teaching science because a lot of us know that for educators going through college, science is lacking in a lot of those courses. It approaches science in a new and dynamic way, it reaches both an elementary school and a high school audience, and it makes science more accessible to the public.
I think the main thing to remember in this is we are getting teenagers excited about science. We’re looking at it in a new and dynamic way to get these kids excited. We have quotes from some of the students, what Science Troupe meant to them at the end. And we had one student actually say, "Science Troupe has really helped me find a love for science that I didn’t think existed and because of that love, I plan on majoring in science education. " Over a hundred students have been though this science course. The majority of them go on to college and the majority also go on to either education or science-related fields. So we know that it’s working.
I can hardly describe what it’s really like. I’ve prepared a short video clip just to give you guys an idea. We have the Science Troupe teaching in the classrooms and the teachers responding to what the Science Troupe has meant to them, coming and teaching at their classrooms to give you a better idea of what’s really going on here. Thank you.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you very much, Erica. Now to an example of the role of a professional society. Chris Condayan serves as the manager for the American Society for Microbiology’s Public Education Outreach Initiative in which he oversees the production of the society’s nationally and internationally syndicated MicrobeWorld Radio program. In addition to terrestrial radio, Condayan has spearheaded the society’s efforts in podcasting, establishing the organization as the first scientific society to have a daily audio podcast and a weekly video podcast. Prior to his work with the American Society for Microbiology, Chris served as the director of communications for the National Mental Health Association where he developed and implemented communications strategies for the oldest and largest mental-health organization in the nation. Previously, Chris produced his own weekly alternate music radio show called Capital Radio on CBS Radio’s 106.7 WJFK station in Washington, D.C. The title of Chris’s presentation is "MicrobeWorld Radio Podcast. " Please welcome Chris Condayan.
Chris Condayan
Thank you. Thanks, everybody, for coming out. Now that I’m all set up, I’m going to talk about our efforts here in the world of podcasting. We produce a show called MicrobeWorld Radio and we have a video podcast as well called Intimate Strangers: Unseen Life on Earth.
I’d like to start off explaining a little bit about what podcasting is. I know most everybody here has heard of it, but I also know from recent statistics from Bridge Ratings and the Pew Internet and American Life Project that only ten percent of you are listening. Podcasting is portable audio and video on demand. Essentially, it’s content such as a television show or radio programming that is delivered to your computer and you can watch it when, where, and however you want on a lot of different platforms and devices. Podcasting is also content as it is published. In other words, you can subscribe to a podcast and have it automatically delivered to your computer, much like you would subscribe to a magazine to have it delivered to your house. And podcasting technology also is syndicated programming which not only can you acquire our podcast from our Web site, microbeworld.org, you can also get it from about eighty other Web sites out there—the iTunes music directory and a host of other podcast directories and science- related sites.
One of the big questions everyone has, the first question, is do you need an iPod? The answer is no. Once you get the file, once your file is downloaded on your computer, you can just play it or listen to it or watch it on your computer, you can burn a CD or DVD of it and put it in your car or in your home stereo system. And you can transfer the file to any portable media player such as an iPod, iRiver, Sandisk, or there are a variety of options out there.
So now that you understand a little bit about what podcasting is, ASM produces two podcasts, one is MicrobeWorld Radio, which is essentially a daily 90-second science news podcast, which focuses on microbiology in the life sciences and geared towards the general public. So you can get a better understanding, I’m going to play a clip for you now. So that’s essentially an example of the audio podcast. We started these on August 1st of 2005.
Shortly thereafter, Apple introduced the video iPod and we decided we should go into video podcasting. And we actually had produced a 4-hour documentary for PBS in 1999. What we did was essentially repurpose that content. We broke it apart into twelve episodes that were easier to digest on the Internet and we put it out there as a series going from January to April. And I just want to play the trailer for you here, because one of the great things about podcasting is that you can export this not only from your computer to your iPod but also to your television set. And you’ll see an example of it, an encoding for the iPod here on this big screen and the resolution looks pretty good. It’s in the wide-screen format, too, which is half the reason why it’s off the screen there. But that’s an example of what we’ve been doing.
Since we launched MicrobeWorld Radio in August of 2005 for the audio program, we’ve had 1.5 million downloads, over a thousand subscribers, so those are people that elect to receive the program. And by the way, in podcasting we say "subscribers ": no one’s paying any money. We’re giving this away for free. And almost 99.99 percent of podcasts are free. And then we have four to six thousand daily downloads, which either come from just using the Flash player on our Web site or from other Web sites that it’s syndicated on.
Intimate Strangers, since January of 2006 we’ve had a half a million downloads, over 500 regular subscribers during the course, the run, and we have almost ten thousand weekly downloads. And this stays true even though the run had ended in April. So it’s still quite popular.
Even though we started off MicrobeWorld really trying to engage the public, one group has really picked up on it and this has been professors and educators in high school. And we’ve received lots of emails and comments from them about how they use it in the classroom. And in fact, one professor at Hawaii Pacific University has actually incorporated our audio podcasts into his curriculum for his introduction to microbiology class.
Here’s some of the feedback. This is from Dr. Dexter Beck from the Chattahoochee Technical College in Marietta, Georgia. He wrote in, "I wanted to share my support for the programs you develop for both the audio and video podcasts of MicrobeWorld and Intimate Strangers. As a college instructor teaching microbiology, I’ve found the audio podcasts interesting and informative, but I’m even more excited about the Intimate Strangers series you recently made available. I’m encouraging my students to make use of these learning tools you are providing. Keep up the great work, it is wonderful. "
Here’s another one from a science teacher who left a comment in the iTunes music store. "These videos are outstanding at explaining life that exists at the microscopic level. The content is simple enough for non-scientists to understand, yet covers the important concepts currently being discussed in microbiology. It contains interviews with the scientists in the field, actual images mixed with friendly cartoon characters, and I look forward to each episode. "
And perhaps the one that I don’t have on here, but I think the one that really sums up what we’re trying to do, we received a comment on the iTunes store that said, "Everything you wanted to know about microbiology before you even know you wanted to know about it. "
We could also track where our podcasts are being heard. And as you can see here, the majority is in the United States, about 70 percent, but they’re also heard in Canada, Japan, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and a host of other countries. Unknown three percent—I guess those are people that have masked their IP address.
And as a result of this, we’ve got some great media coverage and some interesting things that have happened around our podcasts. When we launched, Science magazine did a nice little piece in their NetWatch column. In June of last year The Scientist named us as one of the top eight reasons to tune into science podcasts. Discovery Education has licensed our Intimate Strangers content, and Apple Computer, when they donate iPods to school districts they actually come prepackaged with episodes of MicrobeWorld Radio’s audio program.
To learn more about our podcasting efforts, you can just come to our Web site, microbeworld.org, and find out how to subscribe, more about podcasting, and ways that you can use it. And one thing that I forgot to mention is that we’re also now delivering our podcast to cell phones. So if you have a cell phone you could subscribe and have it delivered to you on a Monday-through-Friday basis. And we’ve also got the technology, too, to deliver it to land lines. So we’re basically trying to give everyone the "no excuse not to listen " to what we’re doing. And it sounds pretty good on a cell phone. Here’s one of our latest episodes. So that’s basically what we’ve been doing. Thank you very much for your time.
Emlyn Koster
Our next speaker is Dolly Ledin. She has worked as outreach coordinator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Biology Education for the past seventeen years. She also has worked as an elementary and middle school teacher and environmental educator with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and is on the adjunct faculty with University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She has a masters of science degree in land resources from the University of Wisconsin- Madison Institute for Environmental Studies. So, please welcome Dolly Ledin who is speaking about "Paradise Lost? Artists on Climate Change in the Northwoods. "
Dolly Ledin
Good morning. Climate change is perhaps the most complex and controversial issue of our time. "Paradise Lost " combines art and science to help increase public understanding of this complex topic. Why art? The idea came from a colleague who happens to be both a biologist and an artist. In researching the idea, we learned that it was not entirely new. We found an article by Bill McKibben suggesting that artists need to bring this issue into our culture because science alone cannot unsettle the audience. He said, "Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what’s happening to us, make sense out of it that proceeds to action. We can register what’s happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices. Art can reach our imaginations. "
With this inspiration, we wrote a proposal to create an art exhibit on the science of climate change. We received a grant from the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, a fund to share the research and expertise of the university to address social issues. We also received funding from the Wisconsin Arts Board. We selected twenty artists from over one hundred who applied. We brought them together with a team of scientists and educators at a workshop in northern Wisconsin. Our goals were to put together a unique mix of art and science that would provide a fresh perspective on this overwhelming issue. We wanted to bring the issue home to residents of the Northwoods, to people like the ice fishermen in Eagle River who might never go to Al Gore’s movie and who might not be able to relate to pictures of South Pacific islands sinking into the ocean. We wanted to help them understand the science and want to learn more about it, and we also wanted to give them tools to do something about it, not to leave them with doom and gloom.
The scientists included David Mladenoff, a forest ecologist; John Magnuson, a limnologist who has studied the changes in lake-ice duration and its impact on lake ecology, Scott Spak, a Ph.D. student in atmospheric sciences doing his dissertation on forecasting local effects of climate change in the Midwest, who also happens to be a cross-country skier; and Teri Balser, a soil scientist who studies the interactions of soil with climate.
We wanted these scientists to give an overview of their research but our challenge was not to overwhelm the artists. We gave the scientists a limit of 15 minutes to talk and asked them to provide visual images, a few carefully selected graphs and charts. If they wanted to spend more time on their topic, they had to take us outside or get us physically involved. We visited lakes, forests, and bogs and used the tools of scientists. We learned how they observe and measure the environment and something about how they think. We also had presentations on changes in phenology or seasonal patterns, storytelling by a native American elder, and a summary of one community’s efforts in carbon-dioxide reduction.
The artists were also a diverse group, including Marilyn Annin, a sculptor who creates lifestyle metal figures; a musician, Charles Thomas, who plays a dozen different instruments and had created a music video on cell division; a painter who paints only outside on cold winter nights, David Neic; and Bonnie Peterson, a fiber artist who creates quilts and happens to enjoy climbing on glaciers. We wanted this to be a two-way street. We wanted the scientists and artists to learn from each other, communicate and interact. So the artists also gave presentations on the role of art in education and in social change. Just as we involved the artists in hands-on science, we thought it only fair to involve the scientists in making art, a threatening idea to many scientists.
But together they made art installations in the bog, the forest, and the lake shore. They worked together making sculptures out of a substance that changes with the climate, a block of ice. Over the three days they spent together, they shared information and ideas and learned to respect each other’s expertise. They also learned that they had a lot in common: keen observation skills, attention to detail, insatiable interest in the natural world and a need to study it and share what they discover. There were late night discussions about uncertainty and probability in science and the aspects of climate change that aren’t up for debate. They developed a vision and goals for the exhibit as well as the title, Paradise Lost?
We kept in touch over the next six months, had regional meetings, and maintained a Web site where they could share ideas, questions, and their emerging work. Now, you’re probably wondering what they came up with. The exhibit is divided into three sections. The first is sort of a climate primer. Bonnie Peterson’s quilt, called "It’s Just Math, " highlights a graph of carbon dioxide concentrations, equations from climate models, and data from ice core samples. Jamie Young created "Ages Three and Up, " a puzzle for our children to show the climate of Wisconsin becoming more like that of Arkansas and being pulled south by SUVs. On the back of the SUVs it says "Arkansas or Bust. " It also emphasizes that it’s our children who will have to put the puzzle back together.
The second section of the exhibit is "Celebrate the Cold, " highlighting unique features of the north, especially those most vulnerable. Amy Arnston’s watercolor, "The Things We Know, " is based on Aldo Leopold’s statement, "We only grieve for what we know, " and illustrates the importance of water to our region’s character. Photographer Jeff Richter selected a series of photos of Lake Superior in February. This one is of ice caves that one could hike to across the ice almost every year, except about the last ten. Diana Randolph’s "Ice Messengers " was inspired by the decrease in ice cover on the Great Lakes in the past thirty years. She also told us that her favorite event is skiing in an event called "Book Across the Bay " that’s a cross-country ski race at night lit by luminaries. It’s probably not going to happen this year.
Along with the artwork, we show related research and worked with the scientists to develop some summaries of the research relating to the art. This one shows changes in lake stratification expected with warmer temperatures as well as changes over the past 150 years in ice duration on a Wisconsin lake. You can easily see that the shortest durations are the more recent years. Helen Klebasadel in "Winter’s End " illustrates the ice breaking up on Lake Superior. Embedded in the ice are images of snow covered forests and cold-weather-dependent species. Terry Daulton depicts a bog, birches and red pines—ecosystems and species vulnerable to warmer temperatures and changes in hydrology. Along with her painting is a graph showing the current southern ranges of these species and their expected migration north. Joyce Koskenmaki painted her "Running Moose " with its skeleton visible after learning that moose populations in Minnesota are dropping dramatically. Warmer temperatures are making them more vulnerable to diseases and parasites as well as decreasing the nutritional value of their food supply. Mary Burns’s "Trail of Feathers, " a weaving of images of birds that are already declining in northern forests.
"Alter the Course " is the third section of our exhibit. Our message: this paradise we call the northwoods does not have to be lost. We can make a difference. We posed the question, "What can you do? " and provided a list of actions, which we had reviewed by several utilities and a coalition of utilities in Wisconsin to make sure that we were listing the most significant changes and correct estimates of their potential impact. Marilyn Annin’s sculpture represents man and Gaia, the Earth. They are the actors or dancers in this drama. They’re not sure of their relationship. Man needs to take a step to influence the next act.
Artists don’t give answers, they reflect a relationship to nature. We may know about climate change, but knowledge alone does not lead to action. We hope that art will. The exhibit opens February 17th in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It will travel to seven sites in Wisconsin, Upper Michigan, and Minnesota. The exhibit is the focal point, but we’re also developing programs to go along with it—lectures, panel discussions, and hands-on family activities at each exhibit site. We have an educator visiting middle and high school classrooms prior to each exhibit’s opening, involving students in learning about climate change, but also in creating art that will be displayed in their community along with their professional artwork.
We’re looking for more ideas to engage communities and have a lasting impact. I do want to mention that we’re doing an evaluation that’s kind of along with the topic. At the end of the exhibit we have an ice shanty, for those of you that are familiar with ice fishing, that people can go in, they’ll see a set of questions and they can speak into a microphone and tell their reflections about the exhibit. So I welcome your ideas. Thank you.
Emlyn Koster
It’s a pleasure for me to introduce Wayne LaBar, who is Vice President of Exhibitions and Theaters at Liberty Science Center, my institution. Wayne oversees the thematic content, exhibitions, large-format film-program design, and overall design aesthetics of our expanding facility. Within this role, Wayne is spearheading the development of a suite of new experiences that are a part of a multi-year $109 million-dollar experience renewal program that, as I mentioned at the beginning, will transform Liberty Science Center, and it will reopen this summer. The goal of this initiative is to make the Center’s experiences with the general visitor more relevant to their everyday life and to global issues, to educate, to inspire action, to inspire new attitude, to address ongoing developments in science and technology, and to enhance the learning and aesthetic environment found at Liberty Science Center.
Wayne and his team members are currently exploring—and this relates to what he’s going to speak about now—how to use new advances in technology and their resultant social changes to advance the exhibition field. Please welcome Wayne LaBar speaking on "The Exhibit Commons—Opening a Science Center to Creations by the General Public. "
Wayne LaBar
Thanks, Emlyn. Good morning. In his book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig, the father of the creative commons, made this prophetic statement, "Digital technologies tied to the Internet could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators. Those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity. " Increasingly, this seems to be coming true in our world. But how might, will, or should this prophesy apply to institutions such as science and technology museums, science centers, and the mediums and devices that they use to talk with the general public?
Under Henry Fairfield Osborne, the American Museum of Natural History became a leader in the paleontology of dinosaurs and presented this work to the public through large-scale exhibitions. This paradigm in large part still holds true today. Exhibits are the principal medium through which museums engage the public with science. They are created by museum staff, advisors, and contractors working together to tell a story and convey some understanding of our world and universe. In fact, I’ve based twenty years of my professional career on this model.
But what does the public do in an exhibition? It hasn’t changed. Should it? Visitors look, read, and today with newer forms of exhibits, they push, pull, crank, or interact. But what you can also count on, whatever the exhibit, is that visitors will also interact by creating their own stories. For whether it be dioramas or even modern interactive science-center exhibits, we, myself as museum staff, always must remind ourselves that the story a museum exhibition or exhibit wishes to tell may not be the only story possible. And at times the visitors’ stories may be as engaging and as relevant as ours and perhaps even more so.
Now in 2007, 99 years after Henry Fairfield Osborne, science and technology centers and museums find themselves in a much different world where the public is empowered about their own stories. In today’s world visitors are surrounded by, but more importantly are participating in, a world of science and technology that they are creating, discussing, or becoming experts in. Whether it be from blogs to encyclopedic sources of knowledge, we are—to quote Lawrence Lessig, "in a world with a more diverse range of creators who are telling their own stories. "
It was in light of this shifting landscape of engagement that the Exhibit Commons project has been launched. Located at this address: www.exhibitcommons.org, it currently holds only introductory pages, but looks to become fully functional in the next eight months. The site is managed by Liberty Science Center and shown here. Despite that, it’s totally a separate institution and Web site. It is meant to be a shared single Web site for the public to find new ways of interacting with science and technology museums and science-center exhibits. It even is hopefully going to include other exhibits at other types of institutions. It includes an area for exhibits, tours, solicitation and a Web blog along with things like, as you can see, books that are inspiring us and news that might be going on about the concept.
Fundamentally, its goal is to turn the old museum and exhibit paradigm that started so long ago on its head. So what is it? At its core, the Exhibit Commons site has been created to be a place where visitors can find museums who have created opportunities to actually participate in the creation, modification, or to use a more common term, hacking, of exhibits that are on the museum floor. Links to those institutions will allow visitors to find such things as exhibit details, formats, codes, software tools, and other tools necessary to enable this to occur. In other words, downloadable will be such things as exhibit drawings—and this is an example I’ve shown here from some of the exhibits from Liberty Science Center—written explanations, tools, and, soon to come, emulators for your own computer. These allow the general public to become involved directly in the science and technology content being presented at the museum, and in addition, the science and technology that makes the exhibit possible.
So our goals with the Exhibit Commons is that by launching this shared site and concept we hope to achieve that visitors will learn about science and technology, but also learn by using scientific and technological tools; to have the public engage in a new form of dialogue between themselves, between experts that they may be participating with, and in fact, the museum as well; and finally to inspire innovation in all ages and expertise, from students to scientists to artists, perhaps even accountants.
The first major step in this effort will occur with the new wing and exhibition renewal at Liberty Science Center in July 2007. Here over thirteen exhibits throughout the center will become part of the Exhibit Commons, even before opening day. Liberty Science Center is committed to putting on the Web the drawings, as you saw before, descriptions, and all the codes that are necessary to allow visitors to do such things from near and far as to submit experiments for our on-the-floor labs in two of our exhibition galleries, to reprogram a digital display we call the Graffiti Wall, to provide video commentary on the nature of environmental issues in their area, pose questions to other visitors that will be part of a public-opinion issue display, create performances for a large art piece that will be the central atrium installation of the science center.
This will mark the first real exhibits linked to the Exhibit Commons web site. Certainly this will also bring challenges and discussions to our institution on such aspects as organized programs to create participation, selection of choice or public content, content value and verification, public expectations, and even exhibition coordination inside the science center. But our goal is to share what we learn from the Exhibit Commons through the Web site itself. We are excited about this new journey we are about to embark on and we hope that you out there, for all of you are the general public, may be inspired to be part of it as well.
Let me conclude by quoting Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, who in his Long Tail book states, "The consequences of all this is that we’re starting to shift from passive consumers to active producers and we’re doing it for the love of it. " What we wish to do is make Liberty Science Center, and encourage other institutions through the Exhibit Commons Web site, to become places where visitors become active producers of the exhibition experience and as a result, actively involved in science, technology, and the dialogue around it. Thank you very much.
Emlyn Koster:
Thank you, Wayne. Number seven of eight, and your 40-minute opportunity to interact with these speakers is about twenty minutes away. Bill Lichtenstein is founder and president of Lichtenstein Creative Media and his 16-year-old Peabody Award-winning media-production company is located in Cambridge here in Massachusetts. His work on radio, television, documentary film, and now 3D virtual reality spans more than 35 years. His company’s productions include The Infinite Mind, Public Radio’s most honored and listened to health and science program, heard in 260 cities across the United States. The ten-year-old show examines all aspects of neuroscience and the human mind. LC Media’s work in documentary film includes West 47th Street, which follows three years in the lives of four people with serious mental illness. The film aired on PBS’s POV and won the Atlanta Film Festival. Bill’s work and that of LC Media has received more than 60 major broadcast and science journalism awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United Nations Media Award, and seven national headliner awards. As part of its work, LC Media conducts extensive post-broadcast outreach efforts to facilitate the use of its programs for children and community engagement, which is what has brought Bill and LC Media to the emerging virtual 3D online community Second Life, where the company now has its virtual offices. Please welcome Bill Lichtenstein, "The Infinite Mind: Science Education in Second Life. "
Bill Lichtenstein:
Thank you all very much. I want to thank Partners HealthCare and the organizers and all of you for the opportunity to come here today to talk about our work in the emerging online virtual community called Second Life and its implications for science education. I want to talk about what it is, how we use it, and what the possible applications are for science education.
Just some quick background. Among other programs, as we mentioned, we at Lichtenstein Creative Media produce The Infinite Mind. It was originally developed around the same founding principle as the old PBS series Cosmos, which took a complicated scientific discipline—in the case of Cosmos, astrophysics—and made it engaging, accessible, and even entertaining for the general public. We set out to do the same thing with neuroscience with The Infinite Mind, and we remain the only national broadcast that week in and week out is covering the mind and brain science, and as mentioned, we reach more than one million people each week in 260 markets.
The tools that we’ve used over the years in public radio are the ones that you’re likely to hear on most public radio shows or stations. So that included interviews and discussions, first-person accounts and oral histories, essays, listener calls and questions, produced segments and author readings and musical performances. That’s how information is transmitted and we try to be as engaging as possible. As radio is often good with oral histories, people’s stories were a particularly good way to convey information in radio.
In 1998, we, as most public radio shows did, moved our work onto the Web and as part of that, the Web site had information about our broadcast, links to organizations, books and related material, you could listen to the programs and download shows and transcripts, and you could share comments and feedback.
Now, before I introduce Second Life and 3D virtual reality, I just want to take a minute to talk about the idea of media, what media does and what its limitations have been. Media involves the organized means of dissemination of facts, news, opinion, entertainment, and other information over time and space. So you can take something that’s going on in one place, transport it someplace else, or you can preserve the words or thoughts of somebody for people a hundred years from now. Up until now, the key existing media that we’ve had to work with consists primarily, if you go chronologically, first of language—people at some point were down at the watering hole and needed a sound to convey that it was a lion and language was born. At some point printed text became possible so information could be transmitted. Art and sculpture, the transmission of sound and then pictures in television and film, and finally the Internet.
But as good as a copy or showing somebody or telling somebody about something, it was never as good as being there and experiencing it for yourself, which is why in science we talk so much about experiential learning, science labs, field trips, and hands-on displays in science museums so that people can actually experience things firsthand. And as we all know, experience is critical to learning. In education, if you consider the words of Seaman Knapp who organized farming demonstrations in the early part of the twentieth century so that people could actually experience proper farming, "What a man hears, he may doubt; what he sees, he may possibly doubt; but what he does, he cannot doubt. " And as you know from science museums, as I say, in labs, that personal experience in that experiential learning is critical in science education. In fact, we’re beginning to see how the brain actually processes interactive experiences in a different way than looking at a two-dimensional representation.
So now comes Second Life and 3D virtual reality, which we have proposed is actually the first medium that can actually transmit experience, or the ability to have an experience, over digital cable. So what we’re talking about is the transmission of an experience. Let’s see how that works. Second Life is 3D virtual platform that’s on the Internet, and everything in it is built and owned by the two and a half million people who are currently residents of Second Life, and they live and work in this virtual environment. You enter Second Life without charge, there are various fees if you want to get more involved, but you can socialize, you can buy and sell objects that you make, and there’s a real in-world economy where you actually can buy what are called Linden Dollars, or like poker chips, and transact with them, and there’s tens of millions of real dollars being transacted each month in Second Life.
To use Second Life, it’s a simple process. You create an avatar, which is a representation of you, and like with any community, you explore, you can share experiences with people, you can buy and sell things including land, and here you see Suzanne Vega and Kurt Vonnegut who appeared live on a program we taped in Second Life, but you can also create a character which looks nothing like yourself. Here’s me on a sixteen-acre virtual campus and broadcast center that we built in Second Life. To give you a sense of what’s possible, this is a look at our virtual broadcast facility that we have in Second Life. There are studios, there are listening rooms, there are places where interviews can be conducted. And in August 2006, we taped four radio broadcasts in front of a live virtual audience and they became the first broadcasts to emanate from Second Life.
I think we have to go now to the—it was supposed to be integrated but I think we have to play it separately. This is Kurt Vonnegut actually being interviewed by John Hockenberry as part of a discussion that took place within Second Life. For science education—what you see here is actually, if you just scroll down a bit, you’ll see there’s an audience. Unlike traditional television and even Web 2.0, there’s an ability to step into the program and become part of the event that’s going on in this virtual world. Thank you very much.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you very much, Bill. Marsha Lakes Matyas serves as the director of Educational Programs for the American Physiological Society. Her research fields include factors affecting science and engineering interests and participation rates among women and minorities at the pre-college, undergraduate, and graduate levels. Marsha earned her masters degree in cell biology and a doctorate in science education at Purdue University. For eight years she directed the projects on women and science for the AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the American Physiological Society, she directs a variety of programs including minority recruitment and retention programs at the pre-college, undergraduate, and graduate levels; summer research experience programs for middle and high school science teachers, including those from Native American reservations; and a mentoring program for graduate and post-doctoral women in physiology. She also has extensive experience as an external evaluator for science-education programs, especially those focusing on girls and women. The education office has developed an extensive career exploration Web site for students of all ages and numerous teaching resources for life-science educators including a National Science Digital Library, the Association’s Archive for Teaching Resources. Please welcome Marsha Lakes Matyas, whose presentation is entitled "PhUn Week: Physiology Understanding Week. " Thank you.
Marsha Lakes Matyas
Well, if Mary Beth Roe were here, she would chide me and say, "Marsha, their elevators are full. They don’t have any more processing room, they need time. " So I’m going to ask you to shift everything, budget over in your elevator for one more program. The Physiology Understanding Week is a K-12 outreach program of the American Physiological Society. And I do want to say at the outset that this program really represents a team effort, it’s not just a staff-driven program. It’s really a member-driven program, has the support of our council, our APS members, and the teachers and school administrators and students who participate.
APS is a scientific society and, as was noted earlier, most professional societies hold meetings, we publish research. We have a membership of about eleven thousand members. And I should note, though, that the APS is also committed to working on public-affairs issues, communicating science with the public and really increasing the diversity of scientists with the physiological community, and we’re very pleased that that work led to the receipt of the 2003 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math and Engineering Mentoring.
We have education programs spanning from pre-kindergarten through professional development for our M.D. and Ph.D. members. But today we want to tell you a little about our K-12 programs that led to the development of PhUn Week. Our flagship program is Frontiers in Physiology, and it’s been in place for quite a number of years. Frontiers works with K-12 science teachers and the point is to help them learn how the scientific research process works. Many people teach science and have not experienced it as a process. They experienced it the way many of us did. You learn the facts, you put them on the test, you do a cookbook lab, and then you go out and teach science. And that’s not the way that science works and it’s not the way we want science taught. It also helps teachers develop productive working relationships with the research community. The program is very focused on national and state standards and has been since the very beginning. And if we were looking for key words with our programs—inquiry, equity, authentic assessment, and integration of Web-based teaching materials are the four things that we really focus on.
Frontiers has two main components. The first is a very successful summer research fellowship for teachers. This is a seven-to eight-week research experience. It’s a paid experience working in the lab of an APS member. But we also have a one-week science teaching forum in the summer. Now, we call this our pedagogy spa, so those of you who like to teach, the teachers there transform cookbook labs into inquiry-based labs. They try out lots of new methods. They try out lots of new materials. As part of the fellowship, they also attend our annual meeting, Experimental Biology. Many of them actually get to present their research in posters at the meeting. Every one of the teachers in our program is mentored by a past fellow for the whole year that they’re in the program. And since 1990, we’ve had more than 300 teachers in 45 states. Every one of those people puts in more than 400 hours of professional development time. And we’re funded by a number of agencies, but the first check is always written by the APS.
The second component is local outreach teams. This came after the research teacher program. And these are teams of teachers and researchers at the local level who are providing professional development for teachers in their community. It really builds teacher and researcher relationships at the grassroots level and it empowers those teams to work together on local science-ed reform. Right now we have 27 local outreach teams in 18 states.
A little about Physiology Understanding Week, I told you that to tell you this, right? The missing component in all of that was, those are very high intensity programs for the researchers and the teachers. We wanted to have a way that many more teachers and researchers could get involved in physiology and in outreach to the schools. So as a result, we developed Physiology Understanding Week. Four major goals. The first one is we want the physiologists out there. We want to involve more of them in outreach to their communities. The second one is, obviously, we’d like to get students interested in physiology and understand what it is, because they often never hear the word and understand what it means in their lives. Many teachers teach physiology and don’t know it because it’s never listed as such in the curriculum. It’ll come up as "structure and function. " And finally, of course, we’d like to introduce students to physiology careers.
So we’ve gone from complex programs with high-tech online interactive professional development, our new component is something much, much simpler. It is a grassroots program. It’s by individuals reaching out to local schools. It is a partnership program, it involves the researchers, the teachers, and the students, and it engages students in relevant learning experience that are related to national and state standards.
Okay. But what is it? Well, we went to our friends at Society for Neuroscience and we said, "Okay, you did brain awareness week. How do we get started? " And they said, "Keep it simple. Don’t start with the big model. Start with the straightforward model. " So our first two years as a pilot test we’ve stuck to two basic models. The really basic model is that in a week in November we’re trying to get physiologists to take their undergraduate students, their graduate students, their post docs, go out to the schools, meet with students, talk about physiology, talk about what they do as physiologists, and most importantly, engage students in hands-on physiology activities. But we have a lot of past research teachers. They wanted a more enhanced model. They wanted to be able to do pre-and post-visit activities. So we provide lots of lesson plans to make that happen.
I think one of the important things to note about this, it’s always a danger when you’re a scientific society, are you just pulling things that you have and using them in the classroom? And we don’t do that. All the materials and methods that we’re using have been developed by teachers in our programs. They’ve been extensively field tested. So we’re very careful about that. And they all meet national science standards and state standards, too. And everything we have is available at the support Web site.
Okay, what do you find at the Web site? We don’t have a staff, as the program grows, to keep emailing and mailing everything to every person who wants to participate, so we want things downloadable, obviously. So at the Web site already you can find basic program information, you can find promotional items. This year we had squeezy-hearts, we had exercise wrist bands, and we had sneaker bags. I had to know what the bags were, I didn’t understand, and people explained it to me. But you can also find a planning form to work with a teacher in your school or to work with a physiologist and plan PhUn Week activities. Promotional flyers and graphics, all the lesson plans and the inquiry based activities, those are the field tested ones I mentioned earlier, PowerPoint presentations on careers in physiology for every grade level, outreach techniques. Do not take your slides of your last scientific presentation to school. If you’ve ever been a teacher who had somebody do that to you, you know what I mean. And boilerplate press releases so that the local community can know what’s going on with PhUn Week in their community.
Our first Web site was very, very basic. We now are going for a new look. This is what you’ll see this fall or actually this spring with Physiology Understanding Week. There’ll be resources there for the teachers, the students, and the researchers. And our theme for 2007 is exercise and health, so it’s a lot—if you go to our Web site and look at it, you’ll see that this is going to look a lot nicer.
We started out with four sites in 2005, nine sites this year, we’re hoping in the coming year to have about twenty sites, and we want to have a tenfold increase by 2008, and have forty sites around the country doing Physiology Understanding Week. In terms of students, the same thing, we started out with about five hundred. We’ve been increasing it this year, next year we hope to have about two thousand, and our goal in 2008 is to have five thousand students involved in the program.
Okay, just briefly, our objectives are, this year is our national program launch. Up until now you had to be invited because you’d been a participant in APS education programs before. Now we’re going to do a national program launch. We’ll be doing a training session at our annual meeting this spring and we’re hoping to meet those target participant goals. Our big needs right now are to look at how do we make that Web site much more interactive, more topic information. I’m inspired by Chris’s podcasts, that that’s what we want our students to find there, we want our teachers to find there. But we also have, as was noted, a very large career Web site. And students come and they get information, but what they really want is to talk to a physiologist online, and that’s something we want to make happen. We are evaluating the program and I can go into more detail with anyone who is particularly interested in evaluation data, but we’d rather do a larger-term evaluation later on.
Finally, our needs, this is my last point. We know that we need publicity to make sure that not only our members but communities know it. The people who’ve been involved in our programs know about it already and will know about it. But we also have been getting great input from teachers in schools who are participating. We are looking for additional funding as the program expands. Right now it’s totally funded by the APS, so we would like to expand those interactive components at the Web site and have more funds for local outreach teams, more funds for research teachers, because those programs will grow as Physiology Understanding Week spreads.
And lastly, if you’re interested, there’s more information at PhUnWeek.org, there’s a flyer out there. If you didn’t get one just let us know up front. And also if you’re interested in Frontiers programs, those are also at the APS education Web site. Thank you very much.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you very much, Marsha.
Well, just to open Part 2 of this first session this morning on Innovative Projects for Public Engagement, perhaps since some of you may have come in midstream, let me just quickly remind you of the journey we’ve traveled this morning. In the order in which my colleagues on the panel are seated, from your right to your left, we started off with the world of public television, looking at how students can be engaged in engineering competition through WGBH. We moved to the principles, the communication protocols of public engagement, public consultation with the CDC in Atlanta. We then went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for how students can become teachers of other students in science. We then went to the American Society of Microbiology to look at the role of a scientific society to engage the public, science educators, and students. We then went to the medium of exhibition in the world of a science center and how that has a new frontier of audience participation and influence. We then went to a field situation in Wisconsin to look at how art and science can be merged for greater "sum of the parts " impact. We then went to the world of virtual broadcasting through the example of Second Life and The Infinite Mind. And we’ve just heard the role of another scientific society, that of the American Physiological Society, trying to move its member services and outreach into broader benefit for the public.
This session ends at 11:30 and I’d like to just provide a couple of minutes of concluding perspectives at the end, so this is now 35 minutes, which is pretty close to the planned time, for you to provide your commentaries on these general principles or the specific projects. I guess we might loosely define an innovation as being a new way of packaging principles with intended new impacts, and clearly each of these talks has done that. So are there microphones in the room? Yes, we have one in each of the aisles. So may I ask you as I did at the beginning to, if you would like to make a comment or ask a question, or make a suggestion, I ask you to identify yourself quickly and also to speak concisely so that we can move through as much of this commentary with as much volume as possible. Who would like to begin, please?
Audience
Hi, my name is Kira Jacobs. I work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency here in Boston. My question is for Roger. I noticed in one of your slides you were talking about what public engagement is not, and you referred to the fact that it is not behavior change. That was one thing I was surprised to hear. I work in drinking-water protection and my job is to work with individuals and communities and help them protect their drinking-water sources throughout New England. So in our work, we actually are asking people to change their behaviors, whether it’s having their septic tank cleaned out so they don’t contaminate their own water supply or asking people to reduce their use of fertilizers and pesticides in their yards. In another case we’re asking people to test their wells to make sure their wells are safe to drink from. So I just was wondering if you could comment at all on whether or not you think in some cases it is appropriate to ask people to change their behavior. I know in this case you were doing a focus group to ask a specific question about policy, but I was just curious if you could comment on that.
Roger Bernier
Thanks for your question. I think the kind of engagement that we’re talking about does not pre-judge the outcome. Whereas if you’re involved in behavior change, there is the assumption that you already know what’s best in one way or another and you’re trying to get people to conform to that. The kind of work we’re doing is more in the nature of, say, jury work, where people are trying to deliberate together and co-create a solution or a verdict, if you will, on a particular policy issue or make a recommendation, and so we don’t come into the situation saying that we think we have the best answer already. Now, admittedly, we may have our views and all of that, and no one is totally coming in with no preconceived ideas, but it is fundamentally a kind of a, there’s an assumption that mutual learning will take place through the give and take conversation of people engaged with people from different perspectives, different walks of life, different experience. And so while you may have even a point of view coming in, the way you go out from the process may not be the same, you may not have the same thoughts.
So I think obviously there are other kinds of ways to work together with the public. There’s a whole volunteer sector where, you know, policies have already been made and the issue is more, well, how do we work together to get this done? So there’s collaboration on the action side, but what we are talking about is engaging the public on the thinking side, on the design side, before the decisions are made. So I don’t want to say that’s the only way, by any means, to involve the public in thinking work. There’s different kinds of work that people can collaborate on together.
Audience
Hi, I’m David Salisbury from Vanderbilt University. I have a question for Chris. You mentioned on the video podcasts that you had divided up a PBS program. You didn’t say whether you’re continuing to create new podcasts or other material, and I’d be interested in how you go about identifying things for that if you’re doing that and whether there’s any way people like me at the universities might be able to provide you with some help.
Chris Condayan
We would love your help. Thank you for offering. It was easy for us to do that video podcast because we already had the content there from the program that we produced with PBS. We do have plans to do some more video podcasts where we’re going to go out to the field and do like maybe five minute documentaries and interview scientists and researchers about what they’re doing, whether it’s in the lab or the field or maybe interesting things students are doing or some things where you combine art and science. So, yeah, there are plans to do that. Right now I’m a one-man team here. So we’re going to be bringing on some more help and trying to expand our content, especially on the video side. And also, I’d like to mention, too, as well, one of our goals for 2007 is to translate our English version of MicrobeWorld into a weekly Spanish version, and we are right now in the process of doing that.
Audience
Hi, my name is Dana Rae Warren. I’m a documentarian and a consultant and teacher. First of all, I just want to say that I think the caliber of the conference so far has been amazing and I hope somebody’s thinking about sending it on the road, "a best of " to go on the road for the Science and Society Conference.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you.
Audience (Dana Rae Warren)
Just a couple quick things. I thought the presentations were so fantastic overall, but I just wanted to mention a couple of things that came out to me, that sometimes it’s easy for all of us to just get a little bit too close to our subject, so the "why does it matter " portion becomes that much more important, and as a part of that, making it real and rooted in a story of human need and experience. And some of those went great. For example, I would just say I thought the virtual world was really fun and I bet there’s a lot about it, I know there’s a lot about it I don’t know, but I guess I just didn’t fully understand why it’s different than watching, for example, the real Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed and that kind of thing. So just as a part of presentations, that might be helpful to people. Similarly, the PhUn Week, I don’t really know enough, because I’m one of those people who got turned off to science early, didn’t know enough about physiology, so rooting it in what, you know, give me a story about what is physiology and what would a student expect to learn, a story of a student who learned something would be better. And the same thing with artists and scientists, you know, you said that you were reaching to the lobstermen and things like that, but then it was kind of scientists and artists coming together so I was curious about a story about how this might have impacted a lobsterman. So those are some of the thoughts that I had.
Emlyn Koster
Would any of the panel like to comment on the sort of human need dimension of bridging the gap that this comment has raised, with respect to their own presentations or otherwise?
Bill Lichtenstein
I think it’s critical. I think that the basic tenets of what we do no matter what the medium, you have to hold storytelling and information and changing attitudes and behaviors. In Second Life it has the quality of talk radio. It allows you to actually, sitting at a desktop anywhere in the world, participate in that group interaction. So all those people you saw were actually people sitting somewhere in the world and they were able to interact real time with Kurt Vonnegut as if they were in an auditorium as we are now. And so it opens up the possibility, for example, you could theoretically have a conference like this with all of us people sitting all over the world at their desktops and having this kind of interaction virtually. And so this is just the very beginning of this medium and you can see the possibilities I think for all sorts of things, including science education. But at the end of it, I think you’re right. What holds it together are the same principles as any education or media.
Emlyn Koster
Dolly and Wayne, could I ask you to comment on this question, form the standpoint of, is the point of the Wisconsin field programs to concretely increase a sense of stewardship of the environment? And Wayne, afterwards, the larger point relative to the mission of the science center in providing this new medium for interaction.
Dolly Ledin
Yes, I think like the woman who asked the question from the EPA, yes, I think we do have specific behaviors that we’re trying to encourage people to do. And in terms of your comment, one of the activities that we’re encouraging the local schools to do is to have students go out and interview elderly people in their community to see how the climate has changed over their lifetime and how it’s already impacting members of the community. So we’re not quite that far yet, but that’s certainly a part that we hope to include.
Wayne LaBar
I would just add that as science centers have moved from a phenomenon base to much more trying to show the interconnectedness between many fields of science and technology and society, that the idea of a story is critical to that in the exhibition medium, and I only think that the technologies that are available today allow us not just to tell the stories we devise amongst our staff, but to tell the stories also that our visitors bring with them.
Emlyn Koster
Julie, would you like to just comment on the competition of engineering aspect? Sort of, what human need, lifelong, do you aspire to create?
Julie Benyo
Well, the show is set up to be a competition. The outreach materials are not competitive in nature. They’re really meant to be exploratory in nature. And then the goal is to not necessarily create, to turn every kid into an engineer, but to show engineering is a pathway to almost anything you want to do in life, that if you look at the CEOs of major corporations, a huge faction of them are engineers. So that it’s a pathway to do many different things and we want kids to understand that this is a way of thinking and it opens a lot of doors to them.
Emlyn Koster:
Thank you.
Audience
My name is Alissa Daniels and I work right here in Boston at the Children’s Museum and I have a comment for Marsha. PhUn Week sounds like fun. And we’ve had a lot of success doing other science-type weeks at the museum. We did engineering week and we’ve done chemistry week and I think it would be great to bring PhUn Week to the general public, not just to schools. So I think children are naturally interested in their bodies and how they work and I think you could really hit younger children by reaching out to other museums and you know, call me.
Emlyn Koster
Do you want to comment on that, Marsha?
Marsha Lakes Matyas
Because I didn’t get to give a definition of physiology yet, so I do have to do that. You’re absolutely right and that’s our phase two plan. Phase one is we want to get those physiologists out there and get over, just like you said, trying to get them to do art, trying to get them to talk to school kids is often tremendously intimidating, it’s not an audience they know anything about, and so we do a lot of hand holding and a lot of teaching in order to do that. And our second phase that we’re hoping to work with is museums. Thankfully, our former K-12 programs coordinator, Kathleen Kelley, is now at the Association of Children’s Museums so we actually have a route that we were thinking of working in that direction. So yes, can I get your card afterwards? Thank you.
Emlyn Koster
Concrete offers happening here. To the immediate right—
Audience
Speaking of cards, my name is Al Wiman, I’m a vice president for public understanding of science at the St. Louis Science Center. My first question, Julie, is how do we get on your radar?
Julie Benyo
Please send me an email or let’s exchange cards afterwards. And we encourage anybody that wants to get on the radar to—
Audience
You’ll not get out of this room without my business card.
Julie Benyo
Okay, good. Because we will answer all of the emails that we get on our Web site and we’re encouraging partners to come on board and we’ll offer training and we’ll offer materials and support along the way.
Audience (Al Wiman)
My next question is to Bill. I want to know something about your financial structure. You mentioned sort of in passing, it’s free but yet depending on how far you want to go, well, I don’t believe that Dell Computers or NASA, that they get in this free and what’s the sponsorship level and what does it cost an individual depending on how far they want to immerse themselves in your world.
Bill Lichtenstein
The platform Second Life, like Yahoo or Google, is owned by a company and it’s an open program. And to go in there is free. If you want to have land, you buy it from the company but they’re very, they’re completely non-directive about what goes on there. So it’s really just sort of a community of people. There aren’t sort of particular rules or directives about what goes on in this online community. So to go in as an individual is free. If you want to do more things you pay a little more each month and if you actually want to buy land there, and to actually have a space that’s your space, you buy that from the company, Linden Lab, that owns Second Life. We are just one of many, at this point, thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who are in there like Dell or like NASA, who’ve bought a space and carved out a spot for ourselves, and it’s something that anybody can do.
Audience
My name is Bob Lichter of Merrimack Consultants and just to set context, I’m a chemist. I used to teach chemistry, I used to be a foundation executive, and now I’m a consultant, which means I’m retired. This is a question for anybody, but I’m particularly interested in Julie’s response. Except peripherally, I haven’t heard anyone talk about evaluation. I haven’t heard anyone talk about how you’re going to know that you’ve reached your outcomes and I’m talking about out-comes not out-puts, I’m not talking about numbers of hits, numbers of people, numbers of participants, and all of that, but you’ve set goals. How are you going to know that you’ve got there? The CDC presentation gave a good example of that. You decided you wanted to know whether this process could affect policy and you showed that to some extent it has, at least stated policy. We hope we don’t have to put it to a real test. But I’d be curious to learn a little bit about what your approaches are to evaluation of outcomes.
Emlyn Koster
Let’s go to Julie and then to Erica next on that one.
Julie Benyo
Thank you for asking. Since this project hasn’t launched yet, clearly we don’t have any impact information, but we are working with a third-party evaluator as we do on most of our projects. And we do have goals that we have set for ourselves for our different target audiences, for the engineers themselves, for the informal educators, and for the youth that we try to reach. And we will be exploring all of those along the way at different points in time. This show is just launching but we hope it will be an ongoing series. So each year that the show is on we’ll be looking at outcomes in different areas, impact outcomes, not the numbers that you’re referring to. As you know, on TV you kind of look at Nielsen ratings and then we want to go way beyond Nielsen ratings to real impacts, the "so-what, " and we will be exploring that with our professional evaluators.
Erica Brandon
As far as the Tyner program works, I think the impact is really judged in the personal stories of the students who go through the program, the teachers who are part of the program, and also the educators who get to see these kids working and how it changes their thinking. We have the goals that I mentioned, that we meet through the program. Then the big goals overall, we’ll know if the impact is working by people jumping on board. We’re very lucky to have a dedicated and hardworking teacher at Tyner who teaches this course and she is here and would be able to answer questions if anybody wants to talk to her afterwards. I mean, we need to find more teachers who are willing to put in that time to work with us, and that’s one of the ways we’re really going to know if this impact is working the way we want it to, to get not only students excited about science, but teachers excited about science, and influence people to realize science is a field that anybody can go into and not at some point in their school careers they just cut it off and say, "Well, science isn’t for me. I didn’t do well in chemistry, you know, I maybe made a C, " because that’s not what it’s all about.
Emlyn Koster
Did you have specific front-end or formative evaluation discussions before this project was launched in Chattanooga to enunciate as clearly as possible the intended learning outcomes which you are now evaluating against?
Erica Brandon
What actually happened was the Tyner Academy had physics and chemistry students that would come during chemistry week or physics week and present programs and it was very successful, and through that we decided that a collaboration would be something we wanted to try. So it actually kind of came about very organically. And so we didn’t have a stated bulletin of points that we necessarily wanted to meet. We have just kind of evolved that as the program has gone on, and luckily we have seen that this program has a whole lot of potential to grow.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you. Yes, Marsha, you want to comment on that same evaluation aspect?
Marsha Lakes Matyas
We’re pretty big on evaluation. Since we’re in the very formative stages and pilot-test stages of our program, we’re trying to collect formative data to find out can the program disseminate, will it go out, will people participate, will they participate year after year after year? That’s one of our first ones that we want to establish before we would go into summative impacts to find out if you do that, what happens with the teachers, the students, the school system, the treatment of science within the curriculum, because otherwise we’re testing whether the model disseminates, we’re not testing summative outcomes.
So we want to do this in stages with the first one being that dissemination and some of those projected statistics that I showed you, but also collecting models. Right now we only have two basic models already within school systems. When the physiologist went out with the model, immediately the school systems came back and said, "But we want you to talk to 80 kids at a time. We want the whole eighth grade there. " So our models are getting revised as we go along and we need to make sure those work before we start doing summative evaluation. And I think both of those are really important to make sure programs grow well and are justified in expansion. The last thing we want is to expand a program that doesn’t work.
Audience
Hi, Marty Downs. I’m at Brown University. Roger, I loved your presentation and I think the issue of values versus expert knowledge is huge and a major reason behind the gap. And I wanted to know if you had thoughts about—clearly this process is energy intensive and takes a lot longer than just making a decision. What sort of triggers the need for that kind of a process? How do you know which issues a priori are the ones that you want to handle that way?
Roger Bernier
I think, the way I’ve tried to describe it is if you think of all of our science decisions at CDC as a pie chart, there is a slice of the pie which I don’t know exactly how big the slice is, but that is a slice where there are clearly values at stake. It was interesting, for the question that we used about rationing influenza vaccine, I really didn’t get any pushback from anyone that there were values questions here. There was no one who said, "Hey, that’s not something that people need to talk about. "
The example that I used for when you would not want to talk to the public is, for example, "Which flu virus do we want to put in next year’s flu vaccine? " If any of you know about influenza, the virus is changing all the time and there has to be a decision made by experts at one point in the year based on what’s going on in the Far East and other parts of the world. Which group of viruses are we going to bet on are going to be the ones circulating a few months from now? And if we make a vaccine for that, then that will be the most protective. Sometimes we guess pretty well, sometimes we guess not so well. I don’t think which of those flu viruses are we going to put in next year’s vaccine is a good question for public engagement, but how we should use the vaccine we have when we don’t have enough for everybody I think is something that clearly involves values.
I will confess one thing, I’m a little scared about it because some people have come back to me and said, "Well, all of our policy decisions involve values. " I think I did it this way to calm the scientists because, I get a lot of pushback about involving citizens in scientific work. So I figure if I could tell the scientists, "It’s only for a little slice of the pie. Don’t worry, we’re not talking about bringing in the public for all of the scientific decisions that we make. " The truth is, some people feel that there are a lot of values lurking behind a lot of science decisions, not only some that are very obvious like the pandemic flu one that I picked. But other than being able to discuss the issue and sort of understand it, I’m not sure that I have a little test that I can say, "Yeah, this is a good one and this is not. "
Another one that came up recently, which got me interested, was the licensure of a new human papiloma virus vaccine, an anti-cancer vaccine. And I saw a story in Fortune magazine where social conservatives were talking about, if we vaccinate young girls, we are potentially going to be encouraging a kind of behavior that we don’t want to encourage and the sort of byline at the end of the story was, "Let the culture wars begin. " And I thought, you know, this is really not what we want to do. And that there are values here at play in developing a policy on the use of this new HPV vaccine, and we ought to be talking together about what is the best national strategy for the use of that vaccine. As it turned out, the recommendations that were made by CDC were not mandatory. It was voluntary, so the tension from the situation diminished. But that’s an issue that may arise in some states that want to pass a law that say all girls should receive that vaccine. At that point, that might be a good topic for dialogue in advance of that. But I don’t have, other than that, talking it through to identify the issues, I can’t really give you a quick test.
Emlyn Koster
Dolly, a quick comment?
Dolly Ledin
Quickly, just in terms of environmental issues, as I mentioned, we’re providing information for people on their individual actions and factual information about the impact changing those individual behaviors can have. But I can see this leading to a community discussion about allocating resources to renewable energy and energy conservation and that more community discussion I think would lend itself more to the collaborative model that we’re talking about in terms of getting individual values and what they’re willing to sacrifice or commit to really changing on the community level.
Audience
My name is Ellen Giusti, I’m a museum consultant, I do evaluation of programs in exhibition. And my question is, when you have the public contributing their point of view, who controls what gets out there? For one thing, how do you pick those people from the public? It wasn’t a very large sample, somebody must choose who’s going to be the one. And also, Wayne, how do you control what gets put up in the museum? I mean, somebody has to moderate or oversee that, it can’t be just anybody who wants to put up their story because the museum will be perceived as endorsing that.
Emlyn Koster
Roger, could you just go first and then to Wayne, please?
Roger Bernier
Quickly, you’re right. We have three-hundred million Americans. There were not three-hundred million Americans that engaged in a discussion about how we’re going to ration pandemic flu vaccine. So the idea is that we’re not trying to replace the existing structures in our society for making those decisions, but the argument is that if we can get some input, meaningful input from the public, and particularly--I don’t know if you picked up in my presentation, Dr. Gerberding mentioned this last night, it was quite by chance that we had an expert group that was deliberating separately from the public. And they came to a different conclusion. I think this has made a big impact on some of the scientists to be able to say, "Well, wait a minute, maybe using our values— " because what else are they going to do— "to make these policy decisions, maybe if we consulted with the public, we wouldn’t quite see it the same way. "
But it does raise a lot of methodological issues about who’s in the room, how do you bring them in? But generally the model tries to get citizens at large, which have no particular affiliation. They come to the meeting out of interest, not because they belong to a particular lobbying group or advocacy group, and then we have the lobbyists and advocates in the stakeholder piece, so we try to get both. But it’s not strictly a random sample of the population, and right now it’s still not very large. And if this model is to catch on, I think those are issues that we’ll have to address, How many people is enough? We tried to solve part of the problem by going to four different parts of the country to try to get some more representation that way, but you’re right, the numbers are still small.
Emlyn Koster
It’s interesting that we’ve invented the jury system where twelve people who are meant to be impartial are meant to make the same decision as any other twelve people would when confronted with the same set of facts. Wayne?
Wayne LaBar
The answer’s very similar in the sense that nothing I said in my presentation said that we were just putting up a piece of corkboard basically, metaphorically, and anybody could just slam up a post-it. As part of the tools and the context in which you’re supplying material, we are outlining, at least for our participation in the Exhibit Commons project, those things that we’re expecting and not expecting. We also know that the public is going to come through the door and encounter not the Liberty Science Center’s exhibit piece, but somebody else’s exhibit piece, and we want to make those understood. So that we are not forgoing review of material in any way, shape, or form. That being said, I think there are public examples where the public does, or a group of individuals does oversee some content. And I think as we evolve this process I’m looking to explore that. I don’t have an answer to that because hopefully as we start this in this coming year, we get to raise some questions and understand some questions that we have to answer, and it would be wonderful to have a co-partner of the public involved with us as we work together, and understanding that and figuring that out would be great.
Emlyn Koster:
Quick supplementary, Roger?
Roger Bernier
If you’ll permit me, I would like to give a quote which I think the audience would find amusing, but a little bit long, not too long. But it shows, we can talk about public participation, about getting the public’s input, and I want to reflect, the audience question here I think was trying to tell us something about how do you sort of control this to some extent. This was a critique from a friend who’s a scientist. He says, "My problem has to do not with the need for public input, but in the ease with which we unwittingly create forums for the injection of non-scientific irrationality under the guise of democracy. In modern times there seems always to be a strong undercurrent of anti-authoritarianism, science having taken on the role of authority. In essence, public input now typically comes with a healthy dose of pseudoscientific twaddle that lies thankfully dormant until it gets legitimized by a pluralistic process. In my opinion, in times like this we need less democracy and more scientific authoritarianism. Institute of Medicine, Surgeon General, etc. The non-scientific public is too easily misled because it doesn’t have and will probably never have the skills to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. " So there’s a whole group of people in the science community that are not warm-and-fuzzy friendly towards some of these concepts.
Emlyn Koster
The example of locally elected public school boards that can change curriculum and move away from evolution to intelligent design would be another example. We’re going to take two more questions, then, to keep this on schedule, I’ll sum up, and I don’t know how to do this other than near to where the microphones are for efficiency. So pick your person, I’m not going to do this.
Audience
My name is Emmanuelle Schuler of the Science Café in Houston, Texas. This question goes to Roger. You eloquently showed that in the case of policymaking that the public reaches a decision that is different from that of the expert. Now, what mechanism do you have to make sure that the view of the public is represented when policy is made?
Roger Bernier
We try to get the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement from the policymakers. But obviously no one will do that. But we do ask that they commit to participate in the process, that they give--quote— "serious consideration to the input, " and that they agree to come back at the end and talk to the participants or communicate with the participants about what the actual decision was and why it was made. So we can’t, in fact, I don’t think we would want policymakers to guarantee that they would agree with whatever the public can come up to, but the minimum we seek is-–quote— "due consideration " and I think there are ways of trying to build that in.
Audience
Hi. My name is Nick Gross. I’m at Boston University. I think the theme that I’ve seen here is basically that we have to stop presenting science as this authoritarian approach and get some input when it’s appropriate. And in particular, I think there are lessons here that we can bring back into the classroom, those of us who are classroom instructors, that are extraordinarily useful, especially since we’re going to start getting students who are going to be used to that kind of process. And if we stand and deliver and push content out, and not get any pushback, they won’t listen to us.
My question is directed to Bill in particular. Bill, I’m Nick, I play World of Warcraft, I freely admit that. One of the things in playing that game that I’ve noticed is there’s an educational component. Second Life to a certain extent when you get on initially, you get educated about the world that you’re in, So the question is, what can we learn from Second Life, from other virtual environments, and from some of this that we can actually bring into the real world and apply to our classroom instruction?
Bill Lichtenstein
Thank you. And just to be clear, the sites that are built in Second Life by institutions, and we’re involved in building them, are built by those institutions and there’s a cost involved in doing that. But to answer your question very specifically, what sets Second Life apart from all of the predecessors, from baseball home video games to World of Warcraft is that all games, when you go into them, have a set of rules and a purpose and you’re engaged and you have to do certain things. Second Life is really, the guy who runs the company is a Buddhist and it’s just, you know, there are no directives, it is just a community.
And the first iteration of it, like a lot of new media, had to do with fashion and music and nightclubs and real estate. And what occurred to us when we looked at it was, Gee, you could use this for education and for broadcast. And it also occurred to us, the World of Warcraft, where people can interact from all over the world, could be used to organize a global peace campaign. There’s no reason you have to go into World of Warcraft and hit each other over the head, you could use it to organize. And so that’s sort of the lay of the land in Second Life. The only thing that’s there is what people have built. Sort of like California in 1848, it’s wide open. You can go in and build whatever you want and there are virtually no rules except very common, "Don’t harm other people. " And so that’s what drives it.
The demographic is much older, 35 I think is the average age and a quarter of people are over 50. If you’re a kid and you go in there, and you can’t get in if you’re under 18, they have a separate teen section, it doesn’t engage you. It’s sort of like getting off the plane in Paris. You have to walk around and find something interesting to do and the longer you’re there, the more interesting things there are. But one of the big things that’s really been a growing area is its use for education and social organizing and these sorts of things.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you, Bill. I’m going to ask the audience if there, among you, is a comment that is two sentences long representing some facet of this innovation that you just haven’t heard being discussed yet this morning. And I’ll go to you in the middle in the front.
Audience
I think the recent discussion leads to the importance of science education beginning in kindergarten and going through, inquiry-based participatory science education. Then our public will be able to make critical and interesting and understanding comments and be able to contribute.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you. I’d like to make my concluding remarks. Firstly, a big resounding applause and appreciation to our panel. And secondly, to recall a moment that was in Boston for me last April 29th when in its centennial year, the American Association of Museums convened its conference in Boston at that time and the rather well known strategist from the Harvard Business School, Michael Porter, was invited to give a keynote to a standing-room-only talk at another hotel here in Boston, and his talk was very much about appealing to the museum field and I think this has general applications, that we all in our innovations, ultimately what we decide to do is presumably some pre-considered carefully chosen priority that’s part of the strategy of our organization. This is not an innovation in isolation, any of these things, it’s all part of a concerted journey of whatever we are responsible to do in the missions of our respective organizations. And Michael Porter said that the business of any organization, and he was speaking about museums, needs to have a very clear sense of where they fit in the value chain of society.
And that has led Liberty Science Center in the ensuing months to become much clearer than it was, as we approached this expansion opportunity, about the segments of the audience that are drawn to come to a science center and what are the needs that each of those segments have—a teacher deciding to bring his or her pre-K or grade 8, whatever, science class, or a parent deciding on the use of his or her time as a social priority on a weekend or a caregiver to a preschool child, whether it’s the grandparent—what value in outcome terms is being provided by the institution to that decision maker? And I think that that has analogies to many of the different fields of endeavor that are in the room. So that as we look at this title of this conference, where the words Science and Society are purposely written in different font because they’re worlds apart in many of our views, each of our types of organization in the room, museum or otherwise, has a role to try and innovate to close the gap.
And of course, that’s a never-ending journey but I think we’ve heard this morning, eight presentations, I think value-driven, value-minded, outcome-orientated, not just output-orientated. It’s like the museum, it’s not just okay anymore to count attendance and celebrate that you had a bigger attendance. Some of us talk about increasingly wanting, perhaps it would be better to have less attendance and more usefulness. Usefulness and popularity aren’t necessarily the same thing. So with all of that, and with all of their remarks, thank you for attending Part One. Part Two starts, if you are interested, at 1:00 P.M. with another eight presentations of this nature. Thank you very much.