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The thoughtful issues Bill and Joe are raising are ones we should all be
considering, and I'd love to see more retreat time (like at ASTC meetings)
with discussions on this level.  I have a few (I hope consoling) comments:

On the balance between exhibitions which offer free exploration vs. those
delivering accepted wisdom, I suggest that whatever our intentions on this,
visitors construct their own exhibitions out of the hardware, environment,
and people that they find when they arrive.  Indeed, the definition of
informal learning has been that visitors set their own agenda.  We cannot
determine whether they use our exhibitions for pure play or for acquiring
specific knowledge from authorities, or for something else entirely.  I've
seen tightly didactic exhibitions used for pure fun ("oh, come look at this
thing, it's cool, whatever it is!) and art pieces with no explicit learning
goals used by visitors as structured constructivist learning tools ("now I
think this is about centrifugal force, because it is trying to show you
that....").  We will fret about the balance we are attempting to establish,
but let's not take ourselves too seriously, because the visitors will create
their own balance no matter what we intend.  "Messing around with stuff" is
going to happen a lot of the time, whether we intended it to or not.

This belief does bias me towards exhibitions with real phenomena, regardless
of the inquiry vs. didactic balance, because then however the visitors
choose to use them, the exhibitions have something real to share.
Simulations worry me, because I find visitors too often focused on artifacts
of the simulation, which may have no relation to the rest of the universe.
I look for a high "reality quotient" in whatever is being made available.

On claiming we are "an important part of the formal education collective," I
try to be cautious and take Mark St. John's position that we are part of the
infrastructure supporting lifelong learning, rather than claiming that we
provide a specific function within the formal education system.  Like a
library, we are a treasury, in our case of phenomena and resources
(exhibits, words, people, environments) about science.  You don't try to
judge a library by measuring what people know pre- and post-visit.  That's
one measure we could use, but only one.  I think we can also make a case
that we provide alternative learning modalities, valued for precisely the
reason that we are _not_ school.  If the formal system finds us useful,
great!  But that's not the primary reason we exist; I hope.

Assessment is a big challenge/opportunity for us to clarify our roles.
Scientists have a habit of mind which constantly insists that we test our
assumptions and beliefs (including this paragraph and all the ones above).
I'm optimistic that we can develop, and to some extent already have
developed, tools for learning what it is we do, and knowing when we have
improved what we do.  We can measure some aspects of traditional learning,
but we can also measure fun, attitudes, and infrastructure functions.  We
cannot measure everything, and so we are going to do some things because our
intuition says we should--just like every other endeavor in our culture.
But we have a special responsibility to practice science by measuring what
we can measure, and learning how to measure more.  That's why I'm spending a
lot of time with the Visitor Studies Association.  Those folks are doing
some ingenious work towards "measuring the immeasurable" (to use the title
of the pioneering 1997 paper by Minda Borun at the Franklin Institute).

Cheers,
Alan
******************************
Alan J. Friedman, Director and CEO
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Queens, NY 11368 USA
Phone +1 718 699-0005 ext. 316
Fax +1 718 760-5932
Mobile +1 917 882-6671
Email [log in to unmask] 

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