Tag: science in museums (Page 4 of 7)

by columnist Cira Brown

I’ve recently been doing a bit of work for the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, part of the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. I love the CHSI and have used it and its exhibitions as a basis for some of my papers here at Tufts. Over the past year I’ve also had internship and volunteer experiences at the Museum of Science and the MIT Museum, and have watched an assortment of visitors engage with each museum’s content. Each of these Boston-area museums attract different types of people, and I want to explore their expectations of their museum visits. I’m also curious as to whether their visit was motivated by an interest in history, science, or even the history of science – and even whether that expectation makes any difference at all.

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By columnist Catherine Sigmond

Let’s face it. English has become the global language, the lingua franca that links us all together. It’s also increasingly being recognized as the international language of science.

For non-native English speakers, the necessity of being able to read, speak, and publish research in English is an ever-growing hurdle.

Of course, the expanding use of the English language touches many more disciplines than just the hard sciences. But the fact remains that many of those who may be interested in pursuing careers in science may be hampered by their lack of high-level English language skills.
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by columnist Kacie Rice

Those who have worked in scientific research know that it’s often a world ruled by numbers and formulas. Even studies based on a mineral’s color or an animal’s morphology (that is, its basic shape and look) have to be backed up by numerical data and rigorous statistical calculations. It’s not enough for me to say, “yep, that rock looks mostly purple to me;” in a scientific publication, I would have to present data on optical density and other factors, and additionally show that these calculations are repeatable under laboratory conditions.

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by columnist Kacie Rice

Having finally started a professional Twitter account in the last few weeks (shameless plug: follow me @kacie_rice!), I’ve become more conscious of the informal advertising that museums do through new media.  While museums still use traditional media such as newspapers and billboards to advertise, they, like most other companies and institutions, have also embraced more casual, up-to-the-minute platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to distribute their messages. This has the additional benefit of allowing museum marketers to deliver many small messages a day, rather than relying on a focused article in a monthly magazine or a subway ad with limited space. It also means museums can respond quickly to major events or schedule changes, as when the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was able to immediately announce its free community days in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings in April.

Obviously, this potential has huge benefit to museums (honestly, way more than enough has been written about new media’s advertising potential by people with far more Silicon Valley cred than me – don’t worry, this won’t be one of those articles), but only if museums can use it wisely. New media, as currently used, should complement traditional media, filling its own niche by providing snippets of current information, links to relevant stories, and casual interactions. It should also allow museums to reach out to the public about experimental topics and stories that wouldn’t necessarily be newspaper-worthy, but could have a happy home on the web (for example, the @smithsonian has recently tweeted numerous survey links soliciting the public’s opinion on potential exhibit topics for the National Postal Museum – before the advent of Twitter, this kind of survey would have to be done either by mail or by museum staff on the floor, and most likely just wouldn’t happen).

So why, with all this potential, do I mostly see museums’ Twitter and Facebook accounts tweeting the same links and information about current exhibits repeatedly? Some museums, such as the Houston Museum of Natural Science (@hmns), do use their accounts to post current science news and memes, but by and large, I’m getting the same thing from the Twitter accounts I’m following that I could get in a small magazine ad. As a potential visitor, I’m following these accounts to gain insider knowledge, current news, and interesting stories – not the same old exhibit ads the museum has been putting out for months.

A notable and admirable exception here is the London Museum of Science (@sciencemuseum), which uses Twitter to regularly invite people to visit its website to play interactive web games and explore collections-based interactives. This, to me, is a perfect use of a museum’s Twitter – it calls attention to an area where educators and developers have obviously spent a lot of time and effort, as well as an area that may be overlooked in traditional media. If museums are developing web-based games and educational materials, presumably they want to public to know about them and use them – so why aren’t they talking about them more often?

Web-based content is often, rightly, viewed as secondary to the “real” museum experience. Museums are inherently object-based (though this gets admittedly murky when talking about science museums), but websites can provide an avenue for more in-depth content, and also a way to reach those who cannot physically reach the museum due to cost, distance, or other limitations. This kind of interactive content can be especially useful for science museums, which often teach complex material that would benefit from the kind of increased experimentation and study that the web can provide visitors.

If I weren’t a professional museum educator, I’m honestly not even sure I would know to seek these kinds of things out on museum websites. Museums have a whole host of these “bonus” programs, such as teacher resources, homeschooler resources, and classroom interactives. These bonuses are rarely advertised to the public, potentially missing audiences of parents or teachers who may want to use them. Museums should be talking about these web-based programs more often, both to reach out to communities in an educational way and to make the most of the resources that they are already pouring into these games and interactives. Twitter, Facebook, and other new media platforms provide the perfect venue for this kind of outreach (best of all, they’re free!) – one that the London Science Museum is readily embracing, and one that I hope to see other prominent museums take up.

by columnist Cira Brown,

This past Sunday, I visited the Museum of Science to see the new exhibit entitled “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life in Ancient Times”. Admittedly, it’s a topic I don’t know much about, which makes it difficult to evaluate how the exhibition presented the material. However, the experience made for a good opportunity to assess learning in a museum from my own standpoint – and I realized something interesting. While the artifacts were stunning and the exhibition beautifully crafted, I emerged from my time in the exhibit without a clear idea of what the objective of the exhibition was. What I mean by this is that despite all of the information in each panel, I was unable to construct a larger understanding of the topic at hand – in short, the big idea, save for a vague larger appreciation for the historical significance of the discovery and preservation efforts.

When I visit an exhibit, it’s usually apparent to me what the “take-away” learning objectives are – the label text, artifacts and interactives all acting as scaffolds to support a predetermined goal. I was unable to discern objectives from this exhibit, as the labels were informative, but did not focus too heavily on any particular aspect. I was expecting to find conflicting theories about the origin and meaning the scrolls, each with their respective academic arguments for and against each theory. Similarly, I expected to be presented with detailed explanations of preservation and restoration efforts. Instead, the exhibition mainly focused on providing context about the era in which the scrolls were written, which in and of itself was a tremendous task. Due to the scrolls unknown provenance and inconclusive assertions about the authors’ motivations, I understand the need to be ambiguous, especially given the “official” status that is bestowed upon the museum exhibit.

Nonetheless, I certainly wouldn’t say this say this exhibit failed, and I should note that I did not participate in the audio tour, which may have remedied some of this confusion. Jumping into an exhibit about a topic I knew little about was challenging and left me with a lot of questions – when I went home I downloaded a book and watched a documentary on the topic as well. The exhibit, then, was successful in that it sparked further research and interest. But in the museum, in the whirlwind of information, I felt fairly lost. I’m curious to know if this alienated visitors instead of empowering them.As I reflect on my time on Sunday, I’ve decided that this “lost” feeling isn’t as negative at it appears. I certainly wasn’t frustrated in the exhibit. If something is challenging, the consequential challenge for the curator and exhibit developer is to translate the topic without making it intimidating or isolating, and I wouldn’t characterize the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit as either. I think it’s okay to not understand everything, perhaps even major things, or have an expectation that visitors will meet those educational objectives in bullet form. It brings to mind the work of art museum educators and the valuable discussions that can be created from visual observation – even if the participants do not know the “hidden” or “true” meanings of the artwork, context or symbols contained within. After this initial engagement with an object or concept, will visitors be more receptive to internalizing other meanings? I believe so – and this starting point is inquiry.

Science museums espouse “exploration”, and fostering exploration within a conceptual topic is a difficult experience to design. The science exhibit developer can emulate an experiment to allow visitors to explore particular phenomena, which are a tried-and-true for science exhibitions. The aforementioned impetus for inquiry is usually explicitly stated in label text. However, are there other, non-interactive, non-explicit ways to mentally explore a topic? What about the progression and formation of an idea, particularly a scientific theory? Like the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls or any historical topic, scientific narratives cannot always be summed up in a succinct manner.

My first foray into exhibit development took the form of an exploratory digital exhibition on one of those tricky narratives: the scientific development of early 20th-century physics and the subsequent development of atomic weaponry. The context needed to present the topic is immense, both on a scientific and historic scale: quantum mechanics plus the global affairs that resulted in two world wars. This project addressed many of the difficulties in fostering exploration that I’ve described here, and, in my next blog post, I will discuss various educational methods to confront these “tricky” topics.

Also, I’d be curious to know what others who saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit thought of it!