About the Seminar

October 25, 2018 8:30am—10:30am

Public engagement with science is vital because it provides opportunities for mutual learning between scientists and the public. Engagement efforts connect the public with new knowledge and the people creating it, and increases scientists’ understanding of public perspectives, values, and worldviews.

Public engagement efforts have grown into their own ecosystem of activities, experts, and methodologies, but current approaches to promoting and evaluating these efforts are fractured. This limits the ability to figure out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to successful public engagement with science. What might be gained if practitioners of different types of engagement—including citizen science, the maker movement, participatory technology assessment, and informal science education—worked together with researchers to build a sophisticated, audience-centered platform that connects engagement across the ecosystem?

One vision to address this is a proposed platform known as The Circuit. The Circuit is a distributed mobile and web platform that will connect the offerings of otherwise-separate public engagement sectors and empower public audiences to more easily discover and participate in these offerings—all while collecting data that explore patterns of engagement and identify factors that contribute to deeper learning, prolonged engagement, and broadened participation.

At this New Tools breakfast seminar, Darlene Cavalier, ASU professor of practice and the founder of citizen science platform SciStarter, will discuss how to make this vision a reality with Ben Wiehe, the director of the Science Festival Alliance at the MIT Museum, and Karen Peterson, CEO and Founder of The National Girls Collaborative Project and The Connectory, which connects young people to STEM learning opportunities. Other collaborators include Joe Heimlich, Director of Research, COSI and Professor Emeritus Ohio State University. Lifelong Learning Group; Martin Storksdieck, Director of the Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning; and Cristin Dorgelo, President and CEO, Association of Science-Technology Centers.

Location Information

ASU Barrett & O’Connor Center
1800 I St NW
8th Floor
Washington, DC 20006

Links

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