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This little essay was written in the planning stages of Galileo’s World (last modified on Jan 29, 2015).  While for lack of time our actual implementation of Galileo’s World fell short of the participatory ideals sketched below, this theory of exhibit design shows how our thinking was indebted to Nina Simon, in that we define “participatory” as when students and visitors become “co-creators of meaning.” This essay also demonstrates that from the very beginning, we were planning the Galileo’s World exhibit in light of exhibit-based educational outreach.  

Participatory mission

Modern museum design is social, participatory, and visitor-contingent.  Participatory means the exhibit experience is interactive and hands-on, but even more profoundly, an exhibit is participatory when it enables and prompts visitors or students to become co-creators of knowledge and meaning.  By this definition, a participatory exhibit will by nature be both social and visitor-determined.  Social means that it connects people by prompting dynamic conversation and promoting human interaction.  Visitor-contingent means that, rather than imposing a single pre-determined path or prescribing a uniform experience, the exhibit by design encourages visitors to experience it in multiple ways.  Participatory exhibit design reflects the engagement mission of the university, of the research library, and of special collections.

With a participatory exhibit design, the mission of library and special collections exhibits is to promote undergraduate and public engagement through meaningful exploration and discovery.

The participatory character of exhibits is articulated by Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (2010); http://www.participatorymuseum.org.

Exhibition without Walls

An “Exhibition without walls’ is a participatory exhibit design, where virtual and physical experiences are seamlessly melded together.  The melding of virtual and physical experiences together into a participatory exhibit is even more crucial to visitor experience for a distributed exhibition – whether distributed physically across different locations or temporally by rotating in and out at different times.  Because the physical and virtual are melded into a seamless experience, every gallery will be continually enhanced throughout the year as the website grows, as student projects are added, as special events are held, as other galleries open or change elsewhere.

The warp and weft of an exhibit

Rather than placing the visitor in a labyrinth with one prescribed path, a participatory exhibit will promote multiple pathways and exhibit experiences.  A simple participatory exhibit design is a multi-colored plaid, whose cross-cutting warp and weft provides visitors with undetermined possibilities for exploring the exhibit.

Galleries:  Each gallery tells a story with one major theme.  To promote exploration and discovery, each theme is posed as an open-ended question.  These themes are comprehensive as a whole, selected to engage the entire campus, without losing focus.  So they each provide a scaffolding upon which the university can build.  Each gallery will be introduced in a brief, 1-2 minute video featuring Galileo’s daughter, Sister Maria Celeste.  She will host each gallery, in full costume, and offer a dramatic prompt to engage, arouse interest, and orient a visitor to the story of the gallery. A gallery is the warp of the exhibition plaid.

Storylines:  Astronomy students and musicians and middle-school classes will not need to see and do the same things. We hope that visitors will return to the exhibit repeatedly to experience it via multiple storylines.   A cross-cutting storyline is the weft of the exhibit plaid.

Visitors may explore galleries and storylines in combinations that are meaningful to them.

Intersecting nodes, or Waystations

A “Waystation” is an intersection between a gallery and a storyline.  Conceptually, it refers to an occasion for any kind of learning activity, often cast into the context of a narrative story or journey.  Think of it as a mile marker on a trail, where different trails meet, and where a cache is hidden containing many desirable items.  Exhibit-based learning is object-oriented; the object (physical or virtual) is the waystation, the point in the trail where one pauses.  This is a place for any visitor to pause and consider whether any of the collected learning activities cached there might be appropriate or engaging for his or her own journey.  A waystation may collect any of the following types of activities:

• Something to read, watch or listen to
  • Excerpts of Galileo’s and other displayed works in translation, or in audio clips
  • Brief explanatory videos (e.g. book notes, Museo Galileo, etc.)
  • Augmented reality, 3-D objects, Oculus Rift, etc. (make books come alive); cf. High-impact AR objects
• A puzzle to solve or think about
  • By inspection or comparison of images
• An instrument to use
  • Instrument video tutorial
  • Instrument exercises
• Learning activities, lesson plans, Open Educational Resources for varying subject areas and grade levels, keyed to K12 curriculum objectives and to university classes in various subject areas
• Something to write or make
  • Comments on a whiteboard or visitor register
  • Take a photo/selfie of oneself against backgrounds customized for the exhibit, such as with Galileo, at Galileo’s home, the Florence skyline, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc. and send to Twitter, Facebook or Flickr with appropriate hashtag. 
• A path to explore, dive deeper
  • Print and digital sources of next resort (located in Exploration Room)
  • Reading Group recommendations
  • Links to catalog, repository, digital projects, Wikipedia, virtual website, external resources, etc.
  • Interpretations to respond to by leaving comments or posts with appropriate hashtag.  
  • Videos on the website of exhibit-related events, growing throughout the year

Examples:

• Telescope gallery:  draw the mountains on the Moon as they appear through Galileo’s replica telescope; then compare them with Galileo’s own depictions in the Sidereus nuncius.  This activity might be of interest to many storylines, including astronomy, painting and the visual arts, and secondary science education.
• Sky at Night gallery:  
  • Compare the night sky around Orion as seen with the unaided eye, with the additional stars Galileo saw using his telescope (and later celestial atlases as well).  Perhaps an animation.
  • Given a modern Moon map of equivalent scale, can you locate Apollo landing areas on Hevelius’ or Riccioli’s lunar map?
• Music of the Spheres, Controversy on the Comets, Galileo Affair, etc.:  crowd-source transcription of manuscripts on display (Baldi, Grassi, Servetus, etc.).
• Music of the Spheres:  duochords; Identify and naming the constellations; Euclid origami; astrolabe, sundial, orreries.
• Galileo Engineer:  abacus, slide rule, compass; which fort is more secure? / how to aim a cannon
• Renaissance art:  How Galileo measured the height of mountains on the Moon
• Galileo, Natural history and Americas:  Which of these was once alive?  (dendrites, petrified wood, glossopetrae); decipher Aztec names.
• New Physics:  
  • On a Venetian ship, how far can one increase the length of oars to outrun Turkish and English ships at sea, before the oars become too thick to be useful?
  • Inclined plane simulation; compare your results with Galileo’s law
  • Projectile motion, archery
  • Impetus thought experiment cartoon
• Microscopy:  Compare microscope views with drawings from books – Apiarium, Leeuwenhoek, Hooke.
• Controversy over the comets:  sextant, quadrant; parallax observation on far wall.
• Galileo affair:  try your hand at copying Galileo’s signature, then press a button to view his actual signature overlaid upon your own

Planning a visit:  which exhibit objects, which activities at which waystations (create your own storyline, or select a pre-defined template)

After identifying waystations, then, for each gallery and for some of the working groups, we will combine select waystations into storylines. 

Waystations provide us with a conceptual way to consolidate a group of lesson activities and resources into a single node, where instructors can choose the activities most appropriate to their group.

A guide embodies a storyline customized for a particular interest or age-group.  A guide escorts each target audience through the exhibition, from gallery to gallery.  A guide will be a fictional characters, but historically representative of a particular place and time.  For example, the guide for an astronomy storyline might be a fictional friend of Galileo’s named Sagredo, who assisted him with his telescopic discoveries, and has “inside” information he heard from Galileo himself about various other figures and episodes he may comment on. Guides for different storylines will stop at different waystations, even in the same galleries, leading visitors to engage the story of the exhibition using different combinations of learning activities.

Some of the storylines worth creating may be:

• Elementary science education
• Middle school science education
• Secondary science education
• Astronomy
• Music
• Mathematics
• Engineering
• Painting and visual arts
• Travel
• Physics
• Natural History
• Science and religion
• Overview (The Galileo Code)

We will have to choose carefully which 3 or 4 or so storylines to create first, depending on our volunteer developers’ interests.  

Engagement:  How do storylines enhance the experience of visitors?

In the Galileo’s World exhibition, we intend to engage visitors with meaningful and memorable experiences.  The storylines are our prime means of achieving these dimensions of visitor engagement.  In the context of storylines, visitors will stop at various waystations.  The result will be a visitor experience characterized by the following:

1. Stories:  Science is a story.  We want to reiterate this in creative ways. Similarly, stories convey meaning more memorably than didactic instruction.  Storylines therefore play a central role in casting a visitor’s experience of the exhibition in the context of a narrative story.
    
2. Participation:  By participation, we mean that the exhibition will engage visitors to construct meaningful experiences for themselves.  By touring the exhibition with a select guide, visitors will feel like they are participating in Galileo’s World in a more dramatic and meaningful way.  Participation is very similar to the aspect of co-creation (next).
    
3. Co-creation:  Visitors learn by creating knowledge and meaning, drawing connections for themselves, constructing meaning in their own frames of reference.  Our approach to this exhibit will encourage visitors to translate Galileo’s World into their own world.  We will seek to make our visitors co-creators of knowledge, rather than seeking only to impart authorized information to them according to our own frames of reference.  We want to emphasize what visitors can do with the knowledge they gain in a participatory way, so that it will be memorable and meaningful to them. Our chief way of promoting co-creation of meaning is to juxtapose Galileo’s world with the world of OU today.  Our chief way of promoting co-creation of knowledge is to promote exploration and discovery via the digital resources provided at the waystations.
    
4. Challenge:  Hard-won experiences are remembered best.  We want to find a way to challenge every visitor of the exhibition.  Many will find a piece of missing context that makes intelligible some otherwise confusing excerpt from a primary source.  For some, the nature of the challenge may involve the intellectual work of identifying and casting away some uncritical preconception.  For others, it may involve constructing an unexpected connection never recognized before between two areas of personal interest.  In practice, a challenge may be as simple as solving a puzzle at a particular waystation, or finding clues in one gallery, or distributed among several waystations, to complete a game level on an iPad before moving on to the next.  For everyone, we hope to engage their creativity and resourcefulness to solve a problem that makes the exhibit more meaningful to them.  We hope no one will leave the exhibit without having met and conquered a challenge of some sort.
    
5. Interaction:  Interactivity means more to us than having touch screen electronic devices or watching animated page curls.  Hands-on activities are very helpful, but they will count as interactive only when they are active and not merely passive activities.  For example, instruments provide one form of interactivity when they are actually used by visitors, hands-on, with the opportunity to record their results and compare them with the historical record (as in drawing the Moon as seen through Galileo’s replica telescope, then comparing it with Galileo’s depiction, and the depictions of other visitors; or similarly with observations made through a microscope).  But interactivity can also mean any kind of active rather than passive engagement, as in the challenge of solving a multi-step puzzle while working through a gallery, before moving on to the next gallery, as if one were moving to the next level of a video game.  
    
6. Persons:  Interactivity also refers to interaction with other persons at various waystations, either virtually (as in competing for highest scores) or tangibly (viewing products created by other visitors, or making decisions with companions, classmates, or others just happening to move through at the same time). How can people share their stories of what made their journey through the exhibit meaningful to them? We want the experience of the exhibit to be personal, and this is also what interactivity means for us.
    
7. Rewards:  What can visitors take away from the exhibit?  Let’s give them something specific and satisfying, whether tangible or virtual.  We can be creative with this, but let’s give some thought to the possible kinds of rewards we might offer.  Visitors who engage in our storylines should earn rewards of some sort for their efforts in knowledge creation, overcoming challenges, puzzle solving, etc.  Tangible rewards might range from displaying the product of their work at a particular waystation, to receiving patches, artistic prints or postcards, to earning the opportunity to print a 3-D object (e.g., a replica telescope).  Virtual rewards might consist of signing their name in the electronic guest-book, which randomly broadcasts previously entered names on a bulletin board, or seeing their name displayed after winning a high score in a competitive game. A typical reward might be the opportunity to get their photo taken with the guide using a special background in Photo Booth, or a Souvenir Penny.

Academy of the Lynx website

Each of the above hosts and guides, along with their storylines, can be made more “real” by the use of social media, coordinated from the Academy of the Lynx website for educators.  That is, we will ordinarily expect that each guide character will communicate with followers (and each other) through twitter, Facebook, flickr and pinterest, and will maintain a blog.  

Check out the blog of Dr. Watson in support of the BBC TV series Sherlock for an example of this kind of use of social media to make the exhibition world more real and engaging.  

We are recruiting educators to write posts on each dramatic character’s blog, twitter and Facebook, and to respond to student and public comments made on the blog.  The storyline blogs will be aggregated and made accessible via the Academy of the Lynx companion website, where comments by students and others will be responded to by educator docents, as often as possible using the distinctive voices of the guides.

———————

Focus Questions for Galileo’s World

• Is the intended audience the university or scholarly community or is it designed for broad public engagement? 

The theme of Galileo’s world was “bringing worlds together.  We connected the World of OU with the World of Galileo.  Creating conversations about these connections was our way of celebrating our 125th anniversary.  Galileo’s World was an exhibition without walls.  It appeared over the course of the last academic year in 20 galleries in 7 locations across the OU campuses of Norman, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa. At the National Weather Center, more rare books were on display than at any other location outside the library. Two exhibits were held at the university Natural History Museum and several at the university art museum.  So the exhibition engaged the entire university… and beyond.  From the outset, we have been coordinating exhibit-based learning activities with educator’s curricular goals.  Lynx Open Ed is our umbrella website to distribute open educational resources. Learning activities from every gallery are gathered together in the Exploration Room. So with respect to this first question, we opted to engage a broad public.

• Is the exhibition curated by scholarly specialists or is it participatory?

By participation we mean the co-creation of knowledge and meaning.  Here are three examples:  First, students and faculty in the College of Engineering created a 1/10th scale model of the leaning tower of Pisa.  More than 20 students traveled to Pisa on this project.  Second, the School of Music presented an opera by Monteverdi that reflects the influence of Galileo’s father Vincenzo.  Third, in the spring semester of 2017, the drama program will present the world’s debut of Galileo’s Torch, a new play by James Reston on Galileo’s trial.  So our approach to Galileo’s World was participatory, in that knowledge and meaning were created not just by historians of science, but by and for the college of engineering, the school of music, the school of drama, the museums and other partners, and the public.  A participatory exhibit entails a certain relinquishing of curatorial control.

Participatory Exhibit Goals

Modern museum design is social, participatory, and visitor-contingent.  

Participatory means more than that the exhibit experience is interactive and hands-on.  Even more profoundly, an exhibit is participatory when it enables and prompts visitors or students to become co-creators of knowledge and meaning.  
 

This participatory character of exhibits is articulated by Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (2010); http://www.participatorymuseum.org.

By its nature, a participatory exhibit entails a certain relinquishing of curatorial control.  The goal becomes less didactic, in order to focus instead upon how to inspire, encourage, provoke and facilitate visitors to discover and explore for themselves.

By this definition, a participatory exhibit will by nature be both social and visitor-determined.  Social means that it connects people by prompting dynamic conversation and promoting human interaction.  Visitor-contingent means that, rather than imposing a single pre-determined path or prescribing a uniform experience, the exhibit by design encourages visitors to experience it in multiple ways.  The meaning of the exhibit emerges as a process of co-creation between visitors, curators, and event and program sponsors.

With a participatory exhibit design, the mission of library and special collections exhibits is to promote undergraduate and public engagement through meaningful exploration and discovery.

In early summer 2016, David Davis and Kerry Magruder wrote three short, one-page reports about Galileo’s World as part of the successful application process for three awards from the Oklahoma Museum Association.  The separate reports, each reproduced here, focus on Exhibit design, technology, and educational outreach. These brief reports just scratch the surface, but maybe offer a starting point to explore more deeply in discussion during docent training events.

Education and outreach

With the launch of the Galileo’s World exhibit, the OU History of Science Collections initiated an educational outreach organization, the “OU Academy of the Lynx,” to work collaboratively with educators in exhibit-based learning. Through the “OU Lynx,” the History of Science curator and his graduate assistants have begun to work with educators in the Norman area, and across the state and in Texas, attending educator conferences and workshops and hosting class visits.

Approximately 30 K12 classes and 50 undergraduate classes have received docent-led tours of Galileo’s World at the OU Libraries, not counting classes which have toured the Sam Noble and Fred Jones museums and other Galileo’s World locations.

Free Open Educational Resources (OER’s) being produced for Galileo’s World are available in the main Exhibit Hall and are posted online at the university repository, ShareOK.org (search for “OU Lynx”). They are being created in various topical series, and linked to the Galileo’s World exhibit by gallery and subject. Series titles include: Iconic Images; Instruments and Experiments; Starting Points for discussion; Primary Source excerpts; 2-minute stories; Stand-up activities; Constellations; and Women in Science.

Many of these are based on content available to educators through the iPad Exhibit Guide, a 1,000 page ebook with more than 6,000 images, available as a free download from the iBook Store, which supplements the content available from the Exhibit Website (galileo.ou.edu).

OER formats include “Card sets” and “Learning Leaflets.” An example of the card format is a set of constellation cards called “Urania’s Mirror.” Each of the more than 20 Learning Leaflets created so far consists of a two-page pdf to print front-and-back on a single sheet of paper. Resembling the popular “Lithograph” format used by NASA in their educational outreach, Galileo’s World Learning Leaflets contain abbreviated text juxtaposed with intriguing images to provoke reflection and discussion. For example, in the case of the most influential star atlas of the 17th century, the person responsible for much of the content and solely for its publication was a woman, Elisabeth Hevelius. Other Learning Leaflets include: Anatomy of a Book; Boldly explore; a Duochord activity (astronomy and music); a Relativity of Motion cartoon; Maria Cunitz; and Johann Shreck, Galileo’s friend in China.

Two other formats are English translations of primary sources, such as the Apiarium, one of the rarest documents in the history of science, and a book discussion guide.

Each of these OERs are “small pieces loosely joined,” designed to be useful in a variety of teaching situations and adaptable to support lessons in multiple subject areas and age levels. They are not lesson plans in themselves, but the raw materials we use in working with educators which may be customized for any particular setting. They are distributed without copyright, so that educators and others may adapt them to their own purposes (under a Creative Commons license, cc-by-nc).

In a new collaboration with the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art during the spring 2016 semester, the Museum educator and the Libraries’ Galileo’s World educator teamed up to take several activities involving art and astronomy to more than 600 students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade public school classrooms in the Norman and south-Oklahoma City area. Schools were selected with a preference toward those least likely to be able to arrange field trips to visit the physical exhibit.

Educators and others may follow the oulynx.org blog to stay up-to-date with OER development and educator outreach.

In early summer 2016, David Davis and Kerry Magruder wrote three short, one-page reports about Galileo’s World as part of the successful application process for three awards from the Oklahoma Museum Association.  The separate reports, each reproduced here, focus on Exhibit design, technology, and educational outreach. These brief reports just scratch the surface, but maybe offer a starting point to explore more deeply in discussion during docent training events.

Exhibit design

The theme of Galileo’s World is “connections.” Open August 2015 through August 2016, Galileo’s World illustrates connections between science, art, literature, music, religion, philosophy, politics, and culture in celebration of OU’s 125th anniversary. Galileo’s World is an “exhibition without walls,” comprised of more than 20 galleries at 7 different locations, as a participatory exhibit designed to bring the diverse worlds of OU together.

The exhibition featured 350 original rare books representing Galileo and his world, all of which belong to OU (none are facsimiles). For example, all 12 first editions of Galileo’s printed books were displayed, including 4 copies containing his own handwriting. These and other valuable works were distributed to the various locations, selected in order to tell stories appropriate to the mission of each exhibition partner.

Many partner locations featured joint exhibitions juxtaposing, alongside the books, their own artifacts and holdings to reinforce the stories told by the books themselves. The sub themes and stories of the exhibit are suggested by the names of the various galleries by location:

• Bizzell Memorial Library: Music of the Spheres; Galileo, Engineer; Galileo and China; Controversy over the Comets; The New Physics; The Galileo Affair. Galileo Today: The OU Leaning Tower of Pisa; The Quest for Other Worlds.
• National Weather Center: Copernicus and Meteorology; Galileo and Kepler; Galileo and Experimentation; Space Science after Galileo; Oklahomans and Space; Science on a Sphere.
• Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, “Through the Eyes of the Lynx”: Galileo, Natural History, and the Americas; Galileo and Microscopy.
• Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art: Galileo and the Telescope; Galileo and Perspective Drawing; The Moon and the Telescope; The Sky at Night.
• Headington Hall: Galileo and Sports.
• Bird Library, Oklahoma City: Galileo and Anatomy; Galileo and Health Care.
• Schusterman Library, Tulsa: The Scientific Revolution.

The Galileo’s World overview contains book lists for each gallery at each location.

Galileo’s World was designed for a wide range of visitors. The primary target audience consisted first of undergraduate students at OU, such as those who participated in the Fine Arts College production of an opera influenced by Galileo’s father (whose book is on display) or the 20-plus undergraduate students in the College of Engineering who examined the Tower of Pisa during a study abroad visit to Pisa, Italy, and then created a 1/10 scale replica of the tower for display in Bizzell Library. The opera and tower projects exemplify the success of the exhibition in facilitating conversation and participation. Inspired by Nina Simon, we defined participation as the “co-creation of meaning.” Secondary audiences are as disparate as all of those who visit OU, including parents, area middle and secondary school groups, distinguished visiting scholars and scientists, and university partners around the world. Educational activities for 3rd grade through adult are available in the main Exhibit Hall and online at the Library’s repository; some of these were taken to more than 600 students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade public school classrooms in the Norman area during the spring 2016 semester. Faculty and distinguished visiting scholars and scientists drew students and a diverse public audience to Galileo’s World events.

Events included a monthly lecture series at the National Weather Center featuring NASA scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an all-day Galileo’s World Symposium at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History featuring internationally recognized speakers (youTube).

Captions were written at different levels appropriate to each location. For example, in Bizzell Library, captions and signage were worded for a freshman target audience. For those who wish to dive a little deeper, additional content is available from the exhibit website and from an iPad Exhibit Guide, available for download or pre-installed on iPads available for checkout at the welcome desk. The Sam Noble and Fred Jones captions were written according to their usual style. At the OU Health Sciences campus, medical vocabulary was introduced appropriate to a target audience of first year medical students. At the National Weather Center, scientific vocabulary was greatly increased, appropriate for graduate students in the natural sciences.

For several locations, the Museo Galileo in Florence provided high quality instrument replicas (for example, of Galileo’s telescope) and high resolution videos featuring animated instrument tutorials.

In early summer 2016, David Davis and Kerry Magruder wrote three short, one-page reports about Galileo’s World as part of the successful application process for three awards from the Oklahoma Museum Association.  The separate reports, each reproduced here, focus on Exhibit design, technology, and educational outreach. These brief reports just scratch the surface, but maybe offer a starting point to explore more deeply in discussion during docent training events.

Technology and media

Galileo’s World involved various technology and media initiatives, both on site and online. These initiatives were designed to help visitors grasp the multifaceted character of the exhibition and to connect the world of Galileo with the world of OU and with their own experience.

On site:

Visitors begin their tour of Galileo’s World at the OU Libraries by watching balls fall from an 18-foot tall replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, when they press a large red button. Two monitors provide explanatory information in this exhibit created by students and faculty in the College of Engineering.

Elsewhere on the main floor, visitors pass by a “Reading Nook” and a “Technology Square.” In the latter, they may explore connections from Galileo’s world to their own world via a large monitor, attached to an iPad kiosk, running an app featuring semantic analysis, created for the Galileo’s World exhibition by the Moomat tech company in Tulsa.

Other exhibits, on the 1st and 5th floors, include 8 monitors with iPad kiosks, featuring a variety of video and audio resources.

The six galleries on the 5th floor include imaginative, one-minute introductions to each gallery produced as letters written to Galileo from his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste (filmed with an OU freshman dramaturgy student). Other resources include video instrument tutorials, provided at high resolution in a partnership with the Museo Galileo in Florence.

An 80-inch monitor in the exhibition theater provides a 2-minute overview of the entire Galileo’s World exhibition. Another 80-inch monitor in the main Exhibit Hall projects beautiful, high resolution, artfully-photographed images of books on display, enhancing the emotional appeal of the rare books as aesthetic objects in their own right.

All of these technological initiatives help visitors connect in a more meaningful way to the original rare books and other objects on display.

Online:

Although Galileo’s World is a temporary exhibit (one year in multiple locations, followed by a two-year reprise), it will endure through a permanent online presence. Central to this enduring presence are three initiatives, each designed with different but overlapping purposes: an Exhibit Website (galileo.ou.edu) for general exploration and discovery, a digital library for scholarly research (repository.ou.edu), and an iPad Exhibit Guide for educators and individual study. The first two of these work with all digital devices.

• The Exhibit Website includes directions and information about each Galileo’s World location, as well as an events calendar. From the Exhibit Website, one may jump to digitized versions of the books in the digital library, read their descriptions in the Libraries’ online catalog, and explore further links. The captions on the Exhibit Website are abbreviated for the casual visitor walking through the exhibit for the first time.
• Each of the 350 original rare books on display is being digitized cover to cover for inclusion in the digital library (most are already uploaded).
• The iPad Exhibit Guide offers more comprehensive information about each gallery and each object on display. Its captions are roughly twice as long as those on the Exhibit Website. At over 1,000 pages and with over 6,000 images, it is a free download obtained by searching the iBook Store for “Galileo’s World Exhibit Guide” (requires the free iBooks app for Mac or iOS).

Free Open Educational Resources (OER’s) produced for Galileo’s World are posted online at the university repository, ShareOK.org (search for “OU Lynx”). Educators and others may follow the lynx-open-ed.org blog to stay up-to-date with OER development and educator outreach.

Finally, Galileo’s World information has been prominently featured in the Facebook, twitter and blogs of the History of Science Collections.  The twitter account (@OUHOSCollection) has more than 500 followers.

This essay was written early in the planning stages of Galileo’s World (last modified on Oct 10, 2014).  For lack of time these ideas were not implemented as planned, but maybe they will be applied somehow in the next exhibit!  The closest we came in Galileo’s World to the exhibit design outlined here is our “Top Ten Tours.”  This theory of exhibit design shows something of what we were thinking when we developed the “Top Ten Tours,” and it illustrates our thinking of how we would make the exhibition participatory (which, with thanks to Nina Simon, we define as when students and visitors become “co-creators of meaning.” This essay also demonstrates that from the very beginning, we were planning the Galileo’s World exhibit in light of exhibit-based educational outreach.  Hope you enjoy it!

What are storylines?

“Storylines” and the dramatic characters which animate them as one journeys through various learning “waystations” are the keys to visitor engagement with a complex, multi-layered exhibition like Galileo’s World.  

Remember the story of how Theseus found his way out of the labyrinth after fighting the Minotaur by following the thread of Ariadne?

In a similar way, “storylines” will help exhibit visitors thread their way through Galileo’s World. 

Storylines make the exhibit come alive

The exhibition is far too large to do or see everything in a single day.  One day a visitor might choose to experience it according to an astronomy storyline; the next occasion they might follow it through with a music storyline, or devote themselves to the storyline of a particular gallery, and so on. Astronomy students and musicians and middle-school classes will not need to see and do the same things. We hope that visitors will return to the exhibit repeatedly to experience it via multiple storylines.  

Each Storyline revolves around a dramatic character

The exhibition interweaves the storylines of various dramatic characters, interesting personalities who anchor stories and give them direction and shape.  A dramatic character is the leading actor of a storyline, the main character of a drama.  Just as writers for a television show develop each episode around the characters played by the leading actors, so we will develop the Galileo’s World storylines around major characters, so that visitors’ experience of the exhibition will be dynamic and engaging.

“Waystations” are the building blocks of Storylines

“Waystation” refers to an occasion for any kind of learning activity that is cast into the context of a narrative story or journey.  (Waystation is also parallel to Reading Station, Instrument station, etc.) The first level of development for each gallery and working group is to focus on identifying and creating “waystations” – points at which visitors and students might pause for exploration and discovery.  

Waystations exhibit the interactive principles discussed below to foster a visitor’s sustained engagement with a particular gallery and to add color to the various storylines which pass through that gallery.  For example, a waystation in the Telescope gallery devoted to the drawing of the mountains on the Moon as they appear through Galileo’s replica telescope and comparing them with Galileo’s own depictions in the Sidereus nuncius might be of interest to many storylines, including astronomy, painting and the visual arts, and secondary science education.

After identifying waystations, then, for each gallery and for some of the working groups, we will combine select waystations into storylines.

“Waystations” anchor lesson plans and specific learning activities

Each waystation is associated with learning activities, video modules, instrument tutorials, etc.  After identifying a waystation, then (moving downscale) we can begin to collect and/or develop the lesson plans to associate with it, in collaboration with educators, amateur astronomers and other partners.  Waystations provide us with a conceptual way to consolidate a group of lesson plans and activities into a single node, where instructors can choose the activities most appropriate to their group.

Storylines feature two types of dramatic characters

Any beautiful plaid consists of colored fabric laid in two directions, the warp and weft:

The combination of only a few colors, overlain in warp and weft, produce a myriad of hues, rich and deep and distinctive.  The synergy between warp and weft multiplies rapidly: only six base colors produce a total of twenty-one different hues!

Just as fabric in a plaid is laid in two orientations, warp and weft, so we have two varieties of storylines, and two kinds of dramatic characters:  hosts and guides.  

Just as the rich potential hues of a plaid result from a few colors criss-crossing back and forth, so, when visitors engage the exhibit through the storylines of only a few hosts and guides, their experience will become as rich and multifaceted as any Scottish plaid.

Hosts

Each gallery tells a story with one major theme.  A host represents a gallery and introduces each gallery’s major theme.  Most galleries will have their own unique host.  The host actor/actress, in full costume, will usually personify one of the authors of a book in its gallery, or a contemporary, and offer insight into the story of the gallery.  The host is the warp of the exhibition plaid.

• Gallery Introduction:  Each gallery host will provide a 2-3 minute video introduction to the gallery theme.  
• Gallery storyline:  A host may also give a visitor the option of pursuing a gallery-specific storyline featuring dramatized authors of the books on display who elaborate on specific topics related to the gallery theme.  For instance, the Galileo and China gallery may have its own storyline.  
• Gallery waystations:  Each gallery section has a Waystations page for various learning activities.  The gallery host will introduce not only the books on display in a particular gallery, but also the associated learning activities or waystations.  A waystation lies at the intersection of the warp and weft of the exhibition, associated with a particular gallery storyline but also utilized in one or more criss-crossing storylines.

Guides

A guide embodies a storyline customized for a particular interest or age-group.  A guide escorts each target audience through the exhibition, from gallery to gallery.  A guide is the weft of the exhibit plaid.  

• Guides are usually fictional characters, but historically representative of a particular place and time.  For example, the guide for an astronomy storyline might be a fictional friend of Galileo’s who assisted him with his telescopic discoveries, and has “inside” information he heard from Galileo himself about various other figures and episodes he may comment on.
• Guides will convey visitors from one gallery host to the next, and provide context in which each gallery host’s comments will make the most sense to the particular group (skipping some galleries or substituting their own briefer comments for those of some gallery hosts).
• Guides for different storylines will stop at different waystations, even in the same galleries, leading visitors to engage the story of the exhibition using different combinations of learning activities.
• Guides need not be unique; Working Groups are free to collaborate in order to create a dramatic character with fuller character depth.  For example, the astronomy and physics Working Groups might decide to develop a single guide character for both of their storylines, or they may prefer to use a different guide for each storyline.

How will storylines work?

Storylines connect various galleries and waystations by placing them in context, within a coherent narrative that adds drama and a dynamic dimension so that visitors experience the exhibit as a journey.  There are various mutually-reinforcing ways visitors will experience the exhibit storylines:

1. Storylines will feature in-costume video shorts. These videos will be produced with collaboration from the drama and theater departments.  They will be displayed on kiosks at each gallery, or flat panels, and/or on the iPads that visitors may carry with them throughout the exhibit. 
2. Storylines provide guidance to docent educators as they lead classes in the exhibit.  A docent might structure the tour around a particular storyline.  A docent might choose to display some of the host’s video shorts on an iPad or flat panel display.  Sometimes a docent might even dress in costume.
3. Storylines also will organize the companion website according to particular themes and age groups.  (See the “Academy of the Lynx website” section below.)

Visitor strategies

Visitors may be adopt various strategies to engage the exhibition:

• Overview:  A minimal, hour-long orientation to the exhibition might consist merely of viewing the galleries, introduced by the brief gallery video introductions, along with a visual survey of the books.  An overview of this sort will be provided by a special storyline called “The Galileo Code.”
• Gallery-specific storyline:  One might also devote oneself to experiencing the storyline of one particular gallery.
• Guide-specific storyline:  Visitors or classes might be escorted through the exhibit via a storyline of topical interest, such as astronomy or music, stopping by a select number of waystations as they travel through a select number of galleries most relevant to the topical storyline.
• Plaid:  More than one of the above in any combination, or returning on more than one occasion.

How will we create the Host and Guide dramatic characters?

Waystations: 

• One way to create dramatic characters for guides is to first think about the learning activities, or waystations, for a particular working group. Waystations are the building blocks of guides and storylines.  Once a few waystations are determined, then one can begin to imagine the sort of dramatic charactert can connect the waystations in a dramatic story.  
• Develop every waystation in light of its storyline potential, so that it will be engaged as part of a larger dramatic context.  
• The nature of any emerging storyline may prompt ideas for creating additional desired waystations. 
• When constructing a dramatic character and storyline, include a mixture of different kinds of waystations.  Consider the types of challenges, puzzles, games, interactions, and rewards that might make a journey through the exhibit according to that character’s storyline more participatory and interactive (see next section).
• Not every working group needs to create a guide or storyline; some working groups may decide merely to create some waystations (learning activities) to be used by other guides within other storylines.
• See the Waystations list.

Gallery storylines:  Each gallery site contains a host storyline page.  On the storylines page for any particular gallery, anyone can leave notes and tips for various dramatic characters, whether hosts or guides.  That is, leave notes and tips for the writers of guide characters to keep in mind when their guides approach that particular gallery.  Perhaps one kind of note or tip would describe a particular waystation being created by a working group that might be of interest to other storylines crossing through that gallery.  Gallery storyline pages are for gallery-specific tips only; the learning activities and scripts for guides will be found on the pages for working groups.

Guide storylines:  Guide characters will be created by working groups.  If you want to create a guide for a particular audience or theme, first create a working group.  On your working group site, create a page to begin characterizing the guide personality and drafting the storyline.  Create a character profile such as this:

Eventually write up a script for the storyline that can be used by the actor or actress who will record the video in costume to be included on iPads and iPhones. The dramatic character will be used as the basis for live tours by docent educators.  Each working group should recruit some educators to create the waystation learning activities for the group’s storyline.  Working group educators will also be invited to train docents, give tours, and create a blog and social media accounts for the guide that will be published on the Academy of the Lynx website (see below).

Each working group can decide whether to create their own storyline or merely to contribute learning activities or waystations that can be “visited” by other storylines.  To create a storyline rather than a waystation will involve a greater and ongoing commitment (see the Academy of the Lynx section below).  But some of the storylines worthy of that commitment may be:

• Elementary science education
• Middle school science education
• Secondary science education
• Astronomy
• Music
• Mathematics
• Painting and visual arts
• Travel
• Physics
• Natural History
• Science and religion
• Overview (The Galileo Code)

We will have to choose carefully which dozen or so storylines to create, depending on our volunteer developers’ interests.  

Engagement:  How do storylines enhance the experience of visitors?

In the Galileo’s World exhibition, we intend to engage visitors with meaningful and memorable experiences.  The host and guide storylines are our prime means of achieving these dimensions of visitor engagement.  In the context of storylines, visitors will stop at various waystations.  The result will be a visitor experience characterized by the following:

1. Stories:  Science is a story.  We want to reiterate this in creative ways. Similarly, stories convey meaning more memorably than didactic instruction.  Storylines therefore play a central role in casting a visitor’s experience of the exhibition in the context of a narrative story.
    
2. Participation:  By participation, we mean that the exhibition will engage visitors to construct meaningful experiences for themselves.  By touring the exhibition with a select guide, visitors will feel like they are participating in Galileo’s World in a more dramatic and meaningful way.  Participation is very similar to the aspect of co-creation (next).
    
3. Co-creation:  Visitors learn by creating knowledge, drawing connections for themselves, constructing meaning in their own frames of reference.  Our approach to this exhibit will encourage visitors to translate Galileo’s World into their own world.  We will seek to make our visitors co-creators of knowledge, rather than seeking only to impart authorized information to them according to our own frames of reference.  We want to emphasize what visitors can do with the knowledge they gain in a participatory way, so that it will be memorable and meaningful to them. This approach is more like a Montessori school, in which we provide joyful opportunities via waystations for visitors to create their own learning experiences in a self-directed and open manner.  It is not to be a didactic lecture hall of the sort epitomized by John Houseman in The Paper Chase! 
    
4. Challenge:  Hard-won experiences are remembered best.  We want to find a way to challenge every visitor of the exhibition.  Many will find a piece of missing context that makes intelligible some otherwise confusing excerpt from a primary source.  For some, the nature of the challenge may involve the intellectual work of identifying and casting away some uncritical preconception.  For others, it may involve constructing an unexpected connection never recognized before between two areas of personal interest.  In practice, a challenge may be as simple as solving a puzzle at a particular waystation, or finding clues in one gallery, or distributed among several waystations, to complete a game level on an iPad before moving on to the next.  For everyone, we hope to engage their creativity and resourcefulness to solve a problem that makes the exhibit more meaningful to them.  We hope no one will leave the exhibit without having met and conquered a challenge of some sort.
    
5. Interaction:  Interactivity means more to us than having touch screen electronic devices or watching animated page curls.  Hands-on activities are very helpful, but they will count as interactive only when they are active and not merely passive activities.  For example, instruments provide one form of interactivity when they are actually used by visitors, hands-on, with the opportunity to record their results and compare them with the historical record (as in drawing the Moon as seen through Galileo’s replica telescope, then comparing it with Galileo’s depiction, and the depictions of other visitors; or similarly with observations made through a microscope).  But interactivity can also mean any kind of active rather than passive engagement, as in the challenge of solving a multi-step puzzle while working through a gallery, before moving on to the next gallery, as if one were moving to the next level of a video game.  
    
6. Persons:  Interactivity also refers to interaction with other persons at various waystations, either virtually (as in competing for highest scores) or tangibly (viewing products created by other visitors, or making decisions with companions, classmates, or others just happening to move through at the same time). How can people share their stories of what made their journey through the exhibit meaningful to them? We want the experience of the exhibit to be personal, and this is also what interactivity means for us.
    
7. Rewards:  What can visitors take away from the exhibit?  Let’s give them something specific and satisfying, whether tangible or virtual.  We can be creative with this, but let’s give some thought to the possible kinds of rewards we might offer.  Visitors who engage in our storylines should earn rewards of some sort for their efforts in knowledge creation, overcoming challenges, puzzle solving, etc.  Tangible rewards might range from displaying the product of their work at a particular waystation, to receiving patches, artistic prints or postcards, to earning the opportunity to print a 3-D object (e.g., a replica telescope).  Virtual rewards might consist of signing their name in the electronic guest-book, which randomly broadcasts previously entered names on a bulletin board, or seeing their name displayed after winning a high score in a competitive game. A typical reward might be the opportunity to get their photo taken with the guide using a special background in Photo Booth, or a Souvenir Penny.

Academy of the Lynx website

Each of the above hosts and guides, along with their storylines, can be made more “real” by the use of social media, coordinated from the Academy of the Lynx website for educators.  That is, we will ordinarily expect that each guide character will communicate with followers (and each other) through twitter, facebook and pinterest, and will maintain a blog.  

Check out the blog of Dr. Watson in support of the BBC TV series Sherlock for an example of this kind of use of social media to make the exhibition world more real and engaging.  

When creating a guide (or a gallery host), consider what kind of personality they will display on the blog and in social media.  Are they male or female?  What kind of sense of humor do they have?  How old are they?  Create a profile so that dramatic characters will not all be the same!  They should each have a distinctive personality and voice.  

We will recruit educators to write posts on each dramatic character’s blog, twitter and Facebook, and to respond to student and public comments made on the blog.  The storyline blogs will be aggregated and made accessible via the Academy of the Lynx companion website, where comments by students and others will be responded to by educator docents, as often as possible using the distinctive voices of the guides.

Website: lists, links, tags

• This page has child pages to list characters (hosts and guides), waystations, and their storylines.  Please add to these lists any waystations, guides or storylines that you work on and link them to the relevant pages in your working group.
• Please tag any pages throughout this site that are related to dramatic characters, hosts, guides or storylines with the storylines tag.  Please tag pages related to learning activities with the waystations tag.

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