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Date: | Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:59:02 EDT |
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ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
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A couple of notes on semantics:
1. I was director of a science center (=science place with interactive
exhibits & no collections, for sake of clarification) in Michigan over twenty
years ago. When I started, the place was named Impression 5 Museum. Impression
5 stood for taking in the world through your 5 senses, but it was all about
science, so we changed the name to Impression 5 Science Museum to let
potential visitors know what kind of experiences people would find and we also
thought "museum" would add some kind of substance so that potential visitors would
not think it was a children's museum. Anyhow, I moved on and a few years
later they changed the name to Impression 5 Science Center. I am not sure if
any of this name changing made any real difference.
2. At the museums where I have been director, we used exhibit in house and
sometimes we said exhibition if we felt in a stuffy mood. We called
individual units "interactives," since that comprised most of what we had.
Otherwise, we would just call the unit whatever it was, a multimedia computer
interactive, a mural, etc.
I am sure this little dissertation of mine will not change a thing and since
we do not have language police, we will keep using words in slightly
different ways, so it is amazing we still seem to all understand each other
somewhat. It isn't quite the same as political discourse, where "pro-life" means one
thing to one political party (anti-abortion) and another thing to the other
party (anti-capital punishment). And so on.
Bob Russell
Learning Experience Design
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