Introducing Open Exhibits: Tell Us About Exhibits in Your Museum
We are in the process of writing our first National Science Foundation grant proposal to fund Open Exhibits, a project that will allow us to develop, test, and disseminate three…
Category Archive for Science
Remembering Artist and Educator Bob Miller
Just yesterday I heard the news that Bob Miller died on Sunday. He was an artist, exhibit developer and educator, and an important part of the Exploratorium experience. Bob developed the inspirational “Sun Painting” exhibit where sunlight goes through a series of mirrors and prisms to create a dynamic “painting.” Years ago, I was lucky enough to participate in one of Bob’s famous “Light Walks.” You can see the online version for a description of the light walk, but it is only that…
ExhibitFiles – New Features Available
We’ve just completed a series of changes to the ExhibitFiles website including: improved “member contacts,” better commenting, and enhanced member profiles. It’s now possible to include blog feeds and flickr thumbnails in your profile. You can see mine here, or click below. Along with improvements to profiles and commenting, a new search feature was developed. While the ExhibitFiles is only a couple of months old, there are already over 40 case studies and reviews and more…
Real Science 2.0: Interacting with Scientific Imagery and Live Data
Today I’m conducting two half-day workshops at the Museums and the Web Conference in San Francisco. This blog post contains the workshop description and the course materials for Real Science 2.0, there’s another post for Museum Mashups. In case you’re wondering, the colorful image of the Pacific Ocean on the left comes from NASA’s SeaWIFS and MODIS/Aqua missions. The bright colors show chlorophyll concentrations in the water. Workshop Description Originally developed as tool to help scientists share information,…
The complete list of NASA Podcasts
Back in 2005, we developed a video podcast for NASA’s Sun-Earth Education Forum (see Traditions of the Sun). Soon after we were invited to became part of listserv which included everyone who podcasts at NASA. A master list of all NASA podcasts has been compiled and floating around the group for sometime now but it has ever been published. I asked Bryan Walls who administers the group if we could publish it, knowing it would be of interest to some of you. Here’s what…
Mashup of the Day and other thoughts
KQED Quest is the Mashup of the Day on the Programmable Web site, the authoritative directory of mashups and Web 2.0 APIs (application programming interface). Two other Ideum design sites appear in the directory as well: The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. and Recycle Torrance. As the Programmable Web shows, we are not alone in experimenting with mashups, the number continues to rise and recently surpassed 1,500 mashups. While we’re on the topic, a…
National Digital Forum: Day 2 – Opening the gates: new opportunities in online collections
In the afternoon of Day 2, Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney presented on their innovative collections database. Seb started out by taking about visitor expectations have changed when comes to what they might be able to find on museum website and how they might browse collections. Seb cited Amazon and Last FM as examples of sites that provide visitors with “recommended” items, assisting users to browse materials within a collection as influential sites in developing their own collections database.
National Digital Forum: Day 2 – Mobile Guide Systems…
The second session on day 2 at the National Digital Forum here in Wellington, NZ focused mostly on the use of portable devices in museums. A highlight was the presentation by Hiroyuki Arita-Kikutani from the National Science Museum, Tokyo. His presentation was entitled, Mobile guide systems in museums through the use of portable game devices. Developed as part of the “e-Japan Strategy,” he discussed a trial using PlayStation Portable (PSP) devices. Between PSP and Nintendo DS, there are over 4 million of…
Latest Images of the Sun: Mac OS X Dashboard Widget
We’ve just finished developing version 1.0 of the Solar Viewer widget this time as a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. Earlier in the year we developed a Yahoo! widget version that works with both Mac and Windows, although you’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine to make it go. Both versions (Yahoo! and Mac Dashboard) show the latest images of the sun from NASA satellites and ground-based observatories. More information about the images and links to larger images are provided. We…
