In October, we recognized the contributions of two ExhibitFiles power-users during a gathering at the ASTC Annual Conference in Philadelphia. Paul Orselli, a self-described instigator and principal of Paul Orselli Workshop (POW!), was among the group of exhibit developers who guided early planning of this site, and one of the first to contribute a review (check out Toasters, posted in April 2007 - and his 8 other case studies and reviews).

Gretchen was also among the early advisors, and her case studies of Psychology and Invention at Play provided models for others to follow. As editor of Exhibitionist, journal of the AAM’s committee on exhibitions, NAME, she - along with Beth Redmond-Jones, Penny Jennings, Eric Siegel, and others - has looked for ways to make this site useful to NAME members. And she’s spread word about the site through presentations to groups outside of the United States.

To them, and to all of our other 960+ members, thank you for so generously contributing to our common fund of knowledge and experience.

ExhibitFiles member Beth-Redmond Jones is looking for good examples of insect zoos (and also life science/ecology halls). Does anyone have a review to contribute?

(The photo, right, was taken by Christine Ruffo of ASTC during the ASTC Annual Conference in Philadelphia two weeks ago. It’s in the Academy of Natural Sciences Butterflies! exhibition.)

Over the last 18 months, we’ve received a lot of suggestions for new features for the ExhibitFiles site. One recurring request is to allow members to post not just full Case Studies or Reviews of exhibits and exhibitions, but short message or media elements. In other words, members could share one image (or video) or just an idea or a question. We’ve been thinking about how best to incorporate this potential new feature.

We want to make it easy to add media so we are envisioning a system that would allow for direct uploads to the ExhibitFiles server or links to images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, along with other services.

Here’s a few mock-ups of how it might work. The first one shows the “Add” page, where members are asked what they would like to contribute to the ExhibitFiles site.

The next screen shows how the ‘Bits main page might look. (Obviously, the gray thumbnails would be populated with images.)

Finally, here’s a mock-up of an individual ‘Bits page. We’re hoping to add the ability to make comments that have associated media files. Notice there is an integrated media-player. This improvement would also be added to Case Studies and Reviews.

This is all preliminary and we’re still working through the details. I didn’t post the proposed form for adding ‘Bits, as this has many layers due to the multiple choices.  (There are lot’s of options for that screen, since we are allowing members to include images and video that already exists on external social media platforms).

We’re open to any comments or questions you might have about ‘Bits. We’ll let you know how this all progresses.

An Inquiry Group working under the auspices of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) is looking to catalog efforts that make informal science education experiences more inclusive of people with disabilities. Founded in 2007 with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), CAISE is a center that works across the entire spectrum of informal science education to strengthen the community’s ability to gather evidence, communicate value, and improve practice.

The Inquiry Group wants to understand:
1. In what ways has the informal science education community worked in the past to include people with disabilities in informal science learning?
2. What does this prior work tell us about actions that should be taken in the future?

If you or your institution has been working to increase access to science education for people with disabilities through informal learning, you can help by completing this survey: http://tinyurl.com/Access-Survey

The survey isn’t limited to exhibitions. But if your work involves exhibitions, we also hope you will post a case study here on ExhibitFiles. (You could refer to it in the CAISE survey, so you don’t have to enter information twice.)

This will help CAISE, and everyone in the informal science education field, to become aware of the good work you have been doing—and, of equal importance, the challenges you encountered.

Thank you for helping.

If you’re a member of ExhibitFiles, and you haven’t yet “favorited” a case study or review, this would be a good time to start. Just a year and a half after the site initially opened, 69 members have taken time to post 137 case studies and reviews, helping to build a common resource for all of us who work with exhibitions.

But many other members are helping, too, by adding tags and comments, and by marking “favorites.” Over time, “favorites” help site users to browse by “popularity.”

We’ll be recognizing some contributions (and contributors) during the ExhibitFiles brunch at the ASTC conference coming up in Philadelphia. Hope to see some of you there.

Wendy

Joel Bloom, longtime director of the Franklin Institute and ASTC’s first president, died on September 23. As many of us recall, Joel used to speak movingly of his childhood memories of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. An obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted one of his speeches: “One of my favorite exhibits was a magnificent Haida war canoe from the Northwest Coast. I would stand beside this canoe and think and dream…I don’t know if I would have become a scientist and then a museum director if that canoe had not inspired me.”  The museum was a “place of dreams,” Joel said.

Dioramas are one of the puzzles of contemporary museum planning. If you have quiet halls and beautiful, old dioramas, what do you do with them? ExhibitFiles member Colin Purrington points out that the diorama in his photo, shown here, is even toxic. What do you think?

If you’re going to the ASTC Annual Conference in Philadelphia next week, there’s an opportunity to pay a call on some venerable dioramas, like this one from the Academy of Natural Sciences. You can find out more about the Academy’s dioramas here.

We were happy to see two new ExhibitFiles case studies posted by participants in the PI Summit, held July 25-26 in Washington, D.C. Liza Pryor of the Science Museum of Minnesota wrote about Science Buzz, and Elizabeth Fleming of the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina, wrote about Flip It, Fold It, Figure It Out. Like a number of other exhibitions described in earlier case studies, both were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a U.S. federal agency.

As anyone in the informal science education field with NSF funding now knows, documenting the impact of the work is an increasingly high priority. NSF issued a Framework for Assessing the Impact of Informal Science Education Projects (PDF) earlier this year to guide grantees, and future proposals will need to address impacts laid out in this publication.

But defining intended impacts can be a challenge in the rich and multifacted world of informal, lifelong learning, and assessing whether or not we’ve achieved these impacts can be even tougher. In a later reflection added as a comment about her case study, Liza notes one challenge she faces in assessing the impact of Science Buzz: “We’re working on our summative evaluation,” she says, “but we don’t have anything to compare our data TO. We’ve got the data from the Pew internet study, but it’s not too helpful. I’m particularly interested in studies of online communities. What’s a decent participation rate? Any way, without resorting to discourse analysis, to figure out what people are learning?”

Maybe this online community can give Liza some help. In fact, we’ll be posting soon about how we’re thinking about this in relation to ExhibitFiles itself.

I just returned from the Visitor Studies Association (VSA) annual conference in Houston. This year’s theme was “Theory, Practice & Conversations,” and the conference was structured for attendee participation—the opening plenary was pitched as potentially “one of the best opening sessions ever, as the speaker is . . . YOU!”

What made the conference such a success this year—and judging from all the wonderful comments I’ve received, I am convinced it was a success—is that the conference organizers focused on drawing out and featuring participant artistic creativity and expression. Not just talk-backs and graffiti boards for attendees to respond to and comment on the conference, but activities and times where attendees could BE CREATIVE—through poetry, art-making, and even interpretive dance (yes, interpretive dance, which might sound silly, but was actually very energizing).

Throughout the course of the conference, I was struck by a sense that conference attendees were behaving a bit differently. They were more animated, they seemed to be interacting with each other more openly, and the conversations seemed to be more about possibilities than problems. Of course (and ironically, given that this was a Visitor Studies Conference) I have no data to back this up, and I am biased to the extreme. But I kept drawing parallels to visitors in our museums and exhibitions.

The presence of opportunities for visitor artistic creation undoubtedly changes the ways they experience the rest of the museum. In addition to asking visitors to respond to our creative work, how can we create situations where visitors do the creating? I have long been a proponent of visitor co-design, and am interested in pushing that idea a bit, to consider exhibits where visitors have been given the creative control in MAKING the experience. Do any of you have examples to share with us?

ExhibitFiles members will be participating in the ISE PI Summit 2008 , July 25-26, when leaders of informal science education projects supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) gather here in Washington, D.C. More than 180 projects will be represented at the Summit, including not only exhibitions, but a range of media, from youth and community programs to broadcast media and online games.

NSF has been supporting the development of ExhibitFiles, so the site can serve as a resource for the science exhibition field. Exhibits people typically rely on personal memories and social networks to fill in the gaps; but the high level of turnover in the field, and retirement and passing of older colleagues, mean much of the history is being lost. By building a collaborative community site with a rich and growing set of exhibition records at its core, it is our hope that together we will preserve this history and support development of a culture of critique. Many NSF-funded exhibition projects, old and new, have already posted case studies, and we look forward to seeing more. Kathy McLean and Wendy Hancock of the ExhibitFiles team will be at the Summit later this week to help anyone who hasn’t yet registered.

The gathering is organized by the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), founded in 2007 with NSF support, which is housed at ASTC. CAISE partner organizations include Oregon State University (OSU), the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE), and Visitor Studies Association (VSA).

It was because of Dan Spock’s informative and thought-provoking review of the Terror House that I found myself there in late May, while I was in Budapest for the ecsite meeting. As it happens, I visited with Andrea Bandelli, who posted his own review the other day, and I shared some of his reactions and reflections. There’s a forced-march quality to the experience, with no place to sit down and think or have a quiet conversation, that makes it hard to address the questions Andrea reminds us of: Why did this happen, and what does it mean for us? (Actually, you could sit, if you wanted to, at the table laid out for Nazi officials.)

There’s no doubt a visit to the Terror House is a powerful experience. Still, I wonder: As captives of a narrative that’s cinematic in its power, are we likelier to leave satisfied that the story is simply over? Is a themed environment that’s polished down to the last detail, lacking in the rough edges of reality, perhaps too smooth for a history of human suffering? Does the implied moral judgment fail to address what Primo Levi called moral gray zones, and thus let us, individually, off the hook? When I visited Dachau in the early 1960s, it was hard to find and starkly real. I wonder if the gritty immediacy made it harder to walk away as if a film had just ended.

Dan notes that the Terror House has stirred controversy within Hungary, at least in part for the very act of remembering it represents. Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of its cinematic interpretive structure, it does create at least one place for highly personal acts of remembrance and reflection, which people have made their own: a row of photographs of people killed after the 1958 revolution that runs around the outside of the building - and under it, a ledge.