Media-Based Learning Science in Informal Environments

The media are the most pervasive disseminators of informal science education in this country. Watching commercial and non-commercial television will provide you with information on alligators or zygotes, bio-fuels or stem cells, polar bears or hurricanes. Radio, too, provides discussions of genetics and global warming and birds and stars. Often radio and television will cover science issues with a contextual overlay of politics or morality, so viewers and listeners can sense how they and their community relate to it. But for excitement, going to the theater to see an IMAX movie will take you deep below the surface of the ocean or up into the stratosphere or into a volcano or the eye of a storm. And if you want more, a planetarium show will even reveal our current understanding of cosmology and black holes and dark matter. The topics seem endless, and they are.