OpenScienceResources
Project description
In an era where science education inadequacy in formal and informal contexts is becoming an increasingly challenging issue, harvesting the potential of digital science education repositories appears as a very attractive alternative. However, an impressive abundance of high quality digital content that is available in European repositories remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers such as: the lack of interoperability between repositories, the inefficiency of current content organization and metadata structures as well as multilingual issues. The OpenScienceResources (OSR) project suggests a coordinated solution at European level in order to overcome the aforementioned barriers. To implement the OSR vision, the consortium brings together a balanced mix of high quality science museums and science centres, pedagogues, educational technologists, metadata experts, user groups and standardization bodies.
Why does it matter
The aim of the OSR project is to create a shared repository of scientific digital objects – currently dispersed in European science museums and science centres – to make them more widely and coherently available, searchable and usable in the context of formal and informal learning situations.
The specific objectives of OSR are:
- To propose a new organization scheme for digital science education content that is available on
science centres’ and museums’ websites and introduce an enhanced paradigm of access, usage and
incorporation within the formal and informal education contexts. - To review the state-of-the-art on digital science education repositories and relevant metadata
structures used. - To customize existing cutting-edge technology to a shared environment that enables the collection of
user terminology and facilitates its analysis. - To perform an extended validation in a wide network of Science museums and centres across
Europe. - To propose a Roadmap towards a standardized Science Resources (re-)usability approach.
- To disseminate the project’s work effectively through networking with relevant projects, networks and
initiatives, the participation in several EC clustering activities and the work towards a pan-European
digital science content standardization.
Partners and funding sources
Partners:
The consortium running the project includes a balanced mix of science museums and science centres, pedagogues, educational technologists, metadata experts, user groups and standardization bodies. Ecsite, the European network for science centres and museums, based in Belgium, is the project coordinator.
The following organisations form the consortium:
- European Network for Science Centres & Museums (ECSITE), Belgium
- Bundesministerium fur Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur (BMUKK), Austria
- MENON Network (MENON), Belgium
- Elinogermaniki Agogi (EA), Greece
- University of Bayreuth (UBT), Germany
- Lambrakis Foundation (LRF), Greece
- Deutches Museum (DM), Germany
- HEUREKA, Finland
- Evgenides Foundation (EF), Greece
- National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci (MNST), Italy
- Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (CSI), France
- Palace of Miracles (CPK), Hungary
- Ciencia Viva (CVPK), Portugal
- INTRASOFT Intl. (INTRASOFT), Luxembourg
- Linnaeus University (LNU), Sweden
- IKnowHow (IKH), Greece
- University of Jyväskylä (JYU), Finland
- Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), USA
- University of Central Florida (UCF), USA
- The Science Education Center at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), Taiwan
Funding source:
The OpenScienceResources (OSR) project is a pan-European initiative funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme.
Results
Methodology
Next steps
Publications
