Creating Connections: Museums and the Public Understanding of Current Research

Science museums are in the business of making science accessible to the public-a public constantly bombarded with new information and research results. How the public understands this information will affect what they expect and take away from a museum's exhibits and programs. Creating Connections looks at the public understanding of research (PUR) and how it affects what science museums do. What are the opportunities and critical issues in PUR? What strategies are working and what are some pitfalls? What can be learned from the media's experiences with PUR? Creating Connections will be an invaluable resource for science museum professionals who want to guide their institutions and their visitors toward a new understanding of and appreciation for current research.

Bill Nye is a scientist, engineer, comedian, and inventor. He has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University where he studied under Carl Sagan, and worked on the 747 as an engineer at Boeing before creating and hosting his much-loved Emmy award-winning PBS/Discovery Channel show Bill Nye the Science Guy. He holds six Honorary Doctorate degrees from Lehigh University, Willamette University, Quinnipiac University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Goucher College, and Johns Hopkins, and teaches at Cornell regularly as a visiting professor.

John H. Falk is executive director of the Institute for Learning Innovation and Sea Grant Professor Emeritus of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University. He is known internationally for his work in the area of free-choice learning; the learning that occurs while visiting museums, science centers, zoos, aquariums, parks, watching educational television or surfing the internet for information. His recent research has focused on studying the long-term impacts of free-choice learning institutions; understanding why people utilize free-choice learning settings during their leisure time and helping cultural institutions of all kinds re-think their future positioning and business models in the 21st century. Dr. Falk has authored over two hundred scholarly articles and chapters and has published more than a dozen books in this and related areas.

Laura Martin is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her publications include Benedikte Nauberts Neue Volksmarchen der Deutschen: Strukturen des Wandels and Narrative Feminine Identity and the Appearance of Woman in Some of the Shorter Fiction of Goethe, Kleist, Hawthorne and James.