D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

1/9

Grant Agreement Number ECP-2008-EDU-428045

OpenScienceResources: Towards the development of a Shared Digital Repository for

Formal and Informal Science Education

Final OSR Annual Conference

Deliverable number D - 8.8

Dissemination level Public

Delivery date April 2012

Status Final

Author(s) Jennifer Palumbo/Ecsite; Johannes-Geert Hagmann/DM

eContentplus

This project is funded under the eContentplus programme1, a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.

1 OJ L 79, 24.3.2005, p. 1.

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

2/9

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

3/9

Table of Contents

1 OBJECTIVES OF THE OSR ANNUAL CONFERENCE ...................................................................... 4

2 THE AAAS ANNUAL MEETING 2012 .................................................................................................... 4

3 TARGET AUDIENCE ................................................................................................................................ 5

4 FINAL OSR ANNUAL CONFERENCE: ................................................................................................. 6

4.1 RATIONALE ............................................................................................................................................... 6 4.2 DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTENT ................................................................................................................. 6

4.3 OUTCOMES OF THE EVENT ……………………………………………………………………….….7

5 CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................................................................... 8

ANNEXES: .......................................................................................................................................................... 10

1. PAPER PRESENTED TO AAAS 2012 ............................................................................................................... 10 2. POSTER ON OSR …………………………………………………………………………………………… 11

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

4/9

1 Objectives of the OSR Annual Conference

The OSR consortium employs a variety of means to build awareness about the project, promote its dissemination and ensure the appropriate exploitation of the results, following the approach outlined in the well-defined strategy project dissemination strategy described in detail in D-8.1. These measures aim to dissemination the OSR project’s research results at a national and European level and beyond. In this final phase of the project, the aim is to create a network of contacts and multipliers that will provide a multi-directional information flow, disseminating the OSR portal to a wide range of new potential users and stakeholders. In accordance with the dissemination strategy and overall approach, during the OSR life cycle three international conferences have been organized (one per year). The aim of these conferences is to bring together researchers, technology developers and the science museums and centres communities to discuss issues related to the OSR approach and its implementation. To maximize the potential impact from the realization of such high-level events, the consortium takes care to organize these annual conferences within existing big science communication and e-learning events.

2 The AAAS Annual Meeting 2012

The Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an international organization supporting the interaction between science, society and policy. With about 130000 members, the AAAS is the largest general scientific society in the world. 2012 marks the 164th year since the creation of the association which annually organizes an international meeting. The AAAS Annual Meeting is a large conference usually hosted within the USA with several thousand attendees from about 50 countries. Presentations at the conference vary in format: from keynote talks to round-panels, oral presentation tracks and poster sessions. In contrast to many scientific conferences focusing on specialists the meeting succeeds in drawing an extremely broad and diverse public with representatives from research, policy making, press as well as the general public of mixed age. The European counterpart of these conferences, the European Science Open Forum (ESOF) was modelled on the successful series of AAAS meetings. The conference theme of this year, “Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society” aimed addressing the challenges of the world in 21st century by advocating the usage of communication and information resources to leverage the existing knowledge addressing interdisciplinary problems in research and society. Regular press releases from the conference organisers kept the public informed about the most important issues during the conference. The event also enjoyed widespread press coverage 1 in different publications around the world.

1 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/the-worlds-science-fair-converges-

on-vancouver/article2340076/

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

5/9

3 Target audience

The AAAS Annual Meeting brings together many different stakeholders from different areas of work and different perspectives on science and technology. The 2012 edition of the conference gathered some 8000 participants1, including policy-makers, researchers and research managers, educators, journalists, families, general public. Scientists, educators, journalists, and others from some 50 nations gathered in Vancouver, British Columbia, from 16-20 February for the 178th AAAS Annual Meeting. The location selected was also significant: The 2012 meeting was focused on the vital link between innovation and international collaboration. And since Vancouver is a Pacific Rim research capital, making an impact in life sciences, marine science, public health, science education, and other areas. The AAAS Office of Public Programs is providing extensive Annual Meeting news, plus a sampling of coverage from around the world.

4 Final OSR Annual Conference

4.1 Rationale

After running a plethora of European-oriented events and activities aimed at involving all relevant target groups in the OSR portal, the consortium decided to take the OSR experience beyond the confines of the European Union, in order to create linkages with other experiences and give the chance to many different kinds of public to benefit from the portal and enrich it with content. Three different partners in the project (Deutsches Museum, Ecsite and NTNU) joined forces to prepare a proposal which was selected in due course for presentation. The AAAS annual meeting is the ideal conference for the final phase of OSR because of the richness and diversity of the conference delegates.

4.2 Description of the content

The poster presented at the conference contained background information on the project, an overall description of the OSR portal and a summary of the main conclusions drawn by the consortium following the project’s activities. A list of the project partners was provided as well as the key findings on the project’s research activities. The project brochure was also distributed to conference delegates when they stopped by the poster display in order to allow interested people to easily access the information online. The presenters gave delegates instructions on how to sign up to the portal, add social tags, retrieve information and contribute their own educational materials to the portal. A mobile device from Deutsches Museum was available for conference delegates to demonstrate the capabilities of the portal through online access. Partners made sure that the mobile device capabilities of the portal were demonstrated according to the individual needs

1 http://president.ubc.ca/files/2012/02/aaas2012feb.pdf

Figure 1. The OSR coordinator, Jennifer Palumbo (Ecsite) speaks with a conference delegate.

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

6/9

of the participants.

Figure 2. The poster session in the AAAS conference exhibition hall.

4.3 Outcomes of the event

Several science centres, museums and research centres were added to the list of associated partners in the OSR project thanks to the visit of their representatives to the OSR poster. The format of the session was very fluid and flexible; therefore each delegate could come close to the poster, examine the information closely, discuss with the project partners and receive a personalised explanation of the possibilities offered by the portal as well as take part in the live demonstration of the mobile version of the portal and its possibilities of use. A great number of high-profile contacts were made during the event, thus helping the consortium achieve the goals of the project, in particular to create a community of users around the portal and allow it to continue to grow and flourish beyond the end of the project.

Figure 3. Two project partners stand in front of the OSR poster.

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

7/9

Annex 1: PAPER PRESENTED AT THE AAAS MEETING

A Digital Platform for Learning and Sharing: The Development of the Open Science Resources Portal

Sunday, February 19, 2012 Exhibit Hall A-B1 (VCC West Building) 1pm-5pm Johannes-Geert Hagmann, Deutsches Museum, München, Germany Chun-Yen Chang, Science Education Center, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan Jennifer Palumbo, European Network of Science Centres and Museums ECSITE, Brussels, Belgium The advent of the internet has made the access to digital resources including educational material inexpensive and easy. The exploitation of the content developed by institutions involved in formal and informal learning activities yet is often limited by the lack of visibility, classification and validation of the content. The EU project Open Science Resources aims at the improvement of the accessibility and usability of digital science learning resources through the development of a joint web repository. Set up in 2009 through a consortium of 21 institutions, the portal has been continuously adapted through the involvement of a large number of users in research and training workshops. Research and training workshops as well as summer schools involving teachers, students and general museum visitors have been conducted for the past 26 months in 9 countries parallel to the technical implementation of the portal. The structured activities included a formal introduction to the functionality of the portal, a presentation of contents and the creation of the users' own educational content including educational pathways to be used in classroom activities. Emphasis was given to social tagging of resources for the creation of user based folksonomies. The workshops concluded with a formal validation procedure including the assessment of portal functions and the scenarios of usage. More than 1000 users have been involved in the trials of the portal that already hosts more than 1300 educational materials and more than 100 educational pathways for structured activities. The user feedback led to several modifications of the search functionality and the structure of the educational pathways. 11000 social tags have been added by portal users for the enrichment of the contributor metadata in the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard. As a fraction of such tags is not included in the original database, the analysis of the tags and the user search patterns shows that the tagging helps users to find resources in the repository. For the development of a multilingual web portal of science learning material, field research on learning practices and user expectations is crucial for the improvement of the portal functionality and the creation of communities of practice. The inclusion of non-expert metadata from social tagging enhances the search function beyond expert keywords. To achieve sustainability of the portal beyond the present proof-of-concept, the involvement of a total of 5000 users is intended until May 2012.

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

8/9

D8.8 Final OSR Annual Conference

9/9