NEI AMNH Wednesday Morning Breakout – J. Stoke, reporting

EDUCATORS/OTHER – 5^th Floor

Discussion Topic: Summary of current state of the field (resources, capabilities, needs and limitations of each community (scientists/missions, viz producers, vendors, users, audience)

Participant	Scientists/Missions	Viz Producers	Vendors	Users	Audiences
Christian Greer	Contributing to the NSTA Feeding frenzy doesn’t result in effective use of resources.		Maybe need some sort of equivalent to ERCs for distribution to informal community?	Cognitive interface and usability not sufficiently emphasized. Public increasingly wants opportunity to interface with things, etc. Need to build framework to connect science to audience’s regular lives.	Visualizations that meet their interests may not be available.
Edna DeVore	Scientists often interested in communicating the content of their specific research without relating it to a broad vision that is of interest to audiences. Scientists sometimes too concerned about people knowing their lingo and acronyms, even though doing so is of little ultimate value to end-users. Work that Hubble/STScI has done to translate data to public-friendly products should be further made known to the e/po mission community.	Some are very interested in being able to enable personal interaction with data. Distribution of E.M. poster through NSTA journal has been effective. (Ditto for IPS – JS) Needed contextual wrapper (in the form of an article that accompanied the poster) so that end-users know what to do with the poster.			Intrigue, engagement, entertainment, enduring value.
Billy Spect	Too much raw stuff being given out at NSTA conferences and then thrown away.
Catherine Tsairides	Many specifically trained groups of people (scientists/mission managers) have not had to collaborate with those who know the casual, free-choice learning audience. It is our role to help them convey their passion to the outside community. We should not send scientists out without training in how to communicate. Yet scientists can break down the meaning when challenged to do so, and do this in ways that ‘educators’ cannot. So need to get scientists on board with the value of public communication.				Expecting future audiences to be more able to think critically.
Joel Halverson	Very impressed with STScI’s dedication to allowing HST to make a very large observation for the sole purpose of public enrichment (HST 15^th anniv. Project)	NASA is doing viz ‘favors’ for people but needs to help empower end-users with tools/capabilities to render out their own customized visualizations. Example: Make geovis data compatible with standard tools such as Geofusion that can deal with metadata standards. (EDNA: NVO is doing this but interface is not there yet.) (Rachael: End users need training in how to do this.) AMNH is doing this nicely in some of their projects.
Rachael Connolly	Scientists need professional development to better understand audiences. (With JS:) Need an e/po template for new missions startups, showing (1) how they can plug into already establishes, successful programs, and (2) a list of basic informal education resources that all missions should be required to provide, in addition to their custom, self-originated projects.		NASA ERCs are not effective.	Not enough emphasis on integrating visualizations into comprehensive products with interfaces that are designed to maximize the educational experience.	The technological capabilities of audiences (kids) are growing because they’ve grown up playing games, etc.
John Stoke	Scientists often don’t understand that people go to restaurants to have a good meal, not to acquire the professional skills of a chef. NASA doesn’t know what it has, or what is popular/needed, and so it doesn’t get behind successful projects or products and support them.	NASA centers with visualization capabilities need to promote their capabilities among the NASA e/po network and among the end-users. Most people are not aware of our capabilities and interests in collaborations.	We provide visualizations to vendors for free distribution to end-users, but never get any feedback as to how our stuff is being used, which makes building support for developing more difficult.	Most “interaction” with media is gratuitous in pushbutton dome enviromments	Audiences hunger for meaning as explained by experts, not just free access to data, even mediated access.

Problem with diagram: No feedback arrows in information flow, just shows information from on high flowing to audiences. Also: No “educators” in the loop.

NSF Study of interest in science shows that people are mostly interested in human biology, things that are perceived to be directly affecting them.

NASA, in its efforts to promote the products and capabilities of NASA centers needs to remember that there are NASA-funded missions and capabilities that are not run out of NASA centers (HST is the largest, but there are others) and they should not be left out of lists and catalogs of resources.

Roadblock: One institution tries for project funding, is not funded, and is left high and dry.

Joel H: Discussed SMEC (Science Museum Exhibit Collaborative) wherein one consortium member takes lead in development of an exhibit, but all members collaborate to attain funding and set overall parameters and goals.