"...museums and other interesting informal science projects can collaborate with their local broadcasters...to reach a larger audience, to reach new sources of funding, and to do things they haven't done before."
"...the audience is becoming much more receptive to user made content. It makes me wonder what the analog is in the museum world because museum exhibit developers also polish their exhibits."
Interview by Marti Louw :: Spring 2007
Louw: Can you tell us what you're working on right now and what excites you and your production team?
Hudson: We are now producing the sixth season of DragonflyTV. This is a particularly interesting experiment in informal science education because it's a collaboration between DragonflyTV, the television series on PBS, and a total of thirty science museums. What we are doing is putting science museums on TV for the first time in an ongoing children's series. Every show is based on going into science museums with kids, doing science inquiry, and then continuing that inquiry outside the institution.
Louw: What have been the challenges in collaborating with museums?
Hudson: So, there is a culture clash. It has really been an exercise in bringing our culture of television production in informal science education together with the culture of the museums as they do informal science education their way and looking for common ground.
Louw: Where have you been able to find that common ground?
Hudson: I think we have common goals in reaching visitors, reaching an audience, and communicating science. All of these goals are common to both enterprises. How we do them turns out to have a lot of variation– some of it practical and some institutional. Museums have very complex bureaucracies and you don't always know who to talk to about what if you're trying to make a television show in the museum. The layers of bureaucracy require some sorting through. TV moves a lot faster than museums do. I'm not casting an aspersion on museums, but that's just how it works. We'll do a whole season of television programming in about nine months from start to finish, which includes all the taping, and all the editing required before it goes on the air. This timeframe, of course, represents only a piece of the planning of an exhibition that might take three or four years.
In terms of finding common ground, I guess one point I would want make here is that we are doing an evaluation on the experiences of the professionals in both the TV and the museums who were involved in this project: What were their expectations? What did they learn? We will be posting that on a wonderful website called InformalScience.org {laughs}.
Louw: The NSF in their ISE program solicitation talk a lot about innovation. With DragonflyTV, the partnership between television and the museums is a nice example of innovation across the field of informal science education. Can you think of other ways in which this might happen or other places innovation might come from in the media-end of the field?
Hudson: That's a good question. We are looking at some other media-museum partnerships to take events that are happening in museums and put them on television in the community where they happen. It's not making a NOVA-style documentary out of an event that takes place in the science museum, but simply broadcasting it locally, in a timely fashion. In this way an event, which is presented to two hundred people in an evening at in a museum, can be captured so that, in addition to the people who were in the museum, another twenty thousand can see it in the community. This is starting to work really well for us. We've done a couple of projects like that with the Science Museum of Minnesota for our TPT Minnesota channel.
Another idea that we're experimenting with is creating a television program out of exhibit development process where we will follow the creation of new exhibits. When it opens, we will have created a half-hour television show which is broadcast on a local PBS station and that will travel with the exhibition so that when it goes to another city the public television station in that city can play the show again to bring more people into the museum and also to communicate the science to a broader audience. These are a couple of innovative ways that we are exploring to make connections with museums and to make television.
Louw: One of PBS's strategic advantages is its sense of localness and community. This is something that museums also have. How might informal science projects further explore the advantages of localness and community?
Hudson: DragonflyTV is a national series. NOVA is a national series. ZOOM and FETCH! are national series devoted informal science learning. There is a dimension of a national series with national outreach materials and activities that can go into museums nationwide. This has been the traditional model and it works really well. What we are learning is that there are other opportunities, even for a national show, but particularly for local television production, where museums and other interesting informal science projects can collaborate with their local broadcasters. It might be PBS, it might be another channel to reach a larger audience, to reach new sources of funding, and to do things they haven't done before. I think this is a new frontier that not many people have explored and I think it's potentially a very rich frontier for the industry.
Louw: What do you see as the threats and opportunities that the Internet, online-gaming, and new media channels present to the producers of traditional television programming?
Hudson: I think the challenges are huge and frightening in a way. We are now streaming all of our videos from DragonflyTV on our website. We're offering them on iTunes as free downloads. There are very complicated rights issues associated with this and if you want to distribute content this way you have to make some important choices. For instance, that is why all of the kids featured on DragonflyTV are everyday kids. They're not child actors. If they were child actors we wouldn't be able to put them on the web without paying them extra money. Since our budget is limited, we work with amateurs. This kind of thinking really has to permeate anything you want to do with the web. We've explored science games. In our experience science games are very hard. Cyberchase is a website on PBS Kids which has a wonderful array of math games. We tried to emulate some of the fun of those in science. But, if you're trying to incorporate real inquiry in a science game, it's really hard. That's probably another really important frontier.
Louw: You've been involved in children’s science programming now for quite a few years from the Emmy Award-winning Newton's Apple to DragonflyTV. Can you talk about how the demands for science programming have changed during your tenure and especially as a form of informal science education?
Hudson: The more things change the more they stay the same. I think the expectations of the audience have changed and are changing very rapidly. An audience that will now choose to visit YouTube instead of watching broadcast TV is something we have to take into account. If you were to compare a program we made on Newton's Apple with a DragonflyTV show, you find much more attention paid to music. You find much more attention paid to video cutting that's much more MTV-like. Even if you look at standard documentaries that might appear on NOVA, a Discovery Channel primetime documentary, or some other PBS science show, you'll see an edgy-ness that certainly wasn't there before. So we're trying to accommodate the needs and interests of today's viewers because they have different tastes and expectations. I think that the biggest challenge – adjusting to audience expectations. The science is very much the same.
Louw: People talk about Web 2.0 technologies and the ways in which the audience, the visitors or the web users can contribute and participate. Are there ways in which the audience might be able to participate more in the science programming?
Hudson: Trying to make broadcast television more interactive, more user-participatory is something we've been trying to do and we tried, in a way, to do it with DragonflyTV. We don't find that we get as much response as we'd like. We certainly don't get the American Idol of Science from kids. We get some interest, but we have to work very hard to find the kids who appear on DragonflyTV. I think there are some new styles, new opportunities, new ways of incorporating video that people, everyday people, can make and putting them into formal television shows. We haven't really figured that out yet. I think technology is helping us because you can go out and buy a camera that will take wonderful broadcast quality video without much work on your part. But if you don't know how to frame a shot or get clean audio, it's going to be hard for us to put that on a primetime PBS show or even a non-primetime show. So there still are some interesting boundaries–the audience is becoming much more receptive to user-made content. It makes me wonder what the analog is in the museum world because museum exhibit developers also polish their exhibits. Maybe they don’t have to. Maybe there's another dimension in that world, too...where whatever anybody comes up with would be viable on the floor of a museum or within a show. We haven't figured it out yet. We're running very fast to try and catch up.
Louw: How is television an important form in informal learning and what does it contribute that is different to after school programs, science and technology centers, and other informal learning venues?
Hudson: I think there are two really important points in that. One is that the viewing numbers are huge, simply astounding. That's what broadcasting is. A typical episode of DragonflyTV will be watched by a million adults and kids each week. It's really hard to imagine that number. When flying at night, we go over some cities and I see the lights of a million people. I still can’t get my head around the fact that what if every single one of those people turned on the TV set and was watching DragonflyTV...yet that's what we're doing when we get a million viewers.
Secondly, in order to be counted, a viewer has to watch at least fifteen minutes. It dawned on me recently that if you get fifteen minutes of sustained attention and you compare that to some of the metrics in museum exhibit visits where you may, over a long period of time, get a million visitors. But, how much time do they spend when you count them? Is it thirty seconds? Is it a minute? So that's why if you look at the numbers of adults at any rate, I don't know about children, adults get most of their information about informal science from either newspapers, television, or increasingly the web depending on which study you read. The web has gotten up to fifty percent, so it's catching up. I think museums have a different role. The local role is a special niche for children. Nevertheless, broadcasting has a unique power that is really had to get your head around because the numbers are so big. What does a million viewers mean to you?
Louw: Do you have specific STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) learning objectives that you design for when you build a program? How do you think about the learning experience that the audience or the child should have when they watch the program?
Hudson: For DragonflyTV, the learning objectives are very specific. They are focused on the scientific process. We don't care very much whether kids learn the vocabulary or whether they learn the science concepts that are presented in the show. We would like them to get the big idea. But what we really want them to follow is the process of asking a question, gathering the data, going through all of the steps of a full inquiry and arriving at yet another question. We're very deliberate about showing each step in the process, every time we do it. We want viewers to appreciate the scientific process, and we want to increase the value the children place on it. That's our goal and our evaluations have rewarded us by showing that kids do get that message pretty strong.
Louw: How do you and your team use evaluation?
Hudson: In our team, we do both formative and summative evaluations and we usually try to focus on specific, rather than general questions. When we were inventing the show, we looked more generally at appeal. When we started our museum-television partnerships, we really wanted to know very early on -- if kids watch one of these segments how does their attitude toward going to a museum change. What can we do to enhance that? So, we look at that kind of data and which then feeds back into our production cycle. If we discover that there are certain blocks to understanding that we learn from viewer studies, we will try to accommodate those in the production and the editing of the segments. Say for instance, if we find that a concept is pretty easy for adults to grasp, but it can go by too fast for kids we will say "Let's open that up. Let's spend a little more time explaining that,” even though that moment may not be quite as MTV as we'd like it to be. Our evaluations give us that feedback so we can make the show succeed as a learning exercise.