What is informal science education?
Informal science education supports people of all ages and walks of life in exploring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
A community-constructed history of the informal science education field is now online—one of the products of the ISE Summit 2010 held last month in Washington, D.C.
The timeline was initiated by Sherry Hsi of the Lawrence Hall of Science, developed with other members of the CAISE Communications Inquiry Group, then prototyped and tested earlier this year by two other CAISE Inquiry Groups. Participants in the March 3-5 ISE Summit added more events—including when they had entered the field themselves. Marti Louw of the University of Pittsburgh Learning Research and Development Center helped to create this gigapan of the timeline, which allows for commenting. With the help of the community, we hope to go on building this record of the development of the ISE field.
For more about the history of the field—and the role of the National Science Foundation in supporting its growth—see David Ucko's and Bruce Lewenstein's presentations, available here. A full report is coming soon.
Photo by Christine Ruffo
The CAISE timeline much better begins to capture the richness and breadth of the field in the United States: it even mentions informal learning in Agriculture Extension and in health fields, which were ignored in the report by the National Research Council and commissioned by the National Science Foundation.
These two chronologies demonstrate the power of informal science learning, in that the CAISE timeline is a product of a community collaborative, while the NRC report is a product of a committee process so formal one wonders if one should wear a tuxedo while reading it.