Museum websites and real-world activity

I've had a longstanding interest in how we can use websites to encourage museum visitors to explore the "real world" -- especially the world of natural environments such as local parks, arboretums, and nature centers. How do we encourage this real-world exploration? Some of my thoughts are in this previous blog entry.

Here's a great example of a site that does this that I came across linked from the Association of Children's Museum's "Good to Grow" initiative: the National Wildlife Federation's Green Hour site. This site is well-designed from the ground up to encourage real world activity: it includes simple and concrete activities to get started, a community and blog to allow users to contribute content, and even a "NatureFind" tool to locate parks near you. This site provides a good model, all wrapped into the larger concept of spending a "green hour" of activity per day.

And here's a screenshot from our project with Smithsonian's National Zoo. We found PDF activity sheets (which lend themselves to being printed and carried away from the computer) a powerful component of the overall site:
(Click to enlarge)

Comments

[Max Antinori]

Brad,

Another great site is run by Richard Louv and the Child and Nature Network (http://www.cnaturenet.org/). They are trying to make April a special outdoor nature awareness month, so wonder if museums are picking up on that as well? And not to throw in a personal plug, but this kind of "get out there" message is what I'm trying to encourage on my Species Explorer site...my tag line is "explore what's out there." Those pdf sheets are a nice "low-tech" device, may try to work those in as well!

thanks for the post!

[Brad]

Hey Max --

Thanks for the post and link to Child Nature Network! Good to see resources focusing on the issue of providing experiences of nature to kids. And good to see your Species Explorer (http://www.speciesexplorer.org/main.html) developing along as well. Great mission -- to encourage observation in the natural world... Keep in touch!