Scope and History
While there have always been individual scientists interested in educating the public, science outreach has recently become more organized. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) now requires all of its projects to organize suitable outreach activities. Also working to inform the public are organizations such as Communicating Astronomy to the Public and Washington Declaration on Communicating Astronomy to the Public that organize conferences for the public on science issues and make efforts to put outreach on a more general institutional footing.
Recently, an increasing number of projects have been hiring designated outreach scientists (part-time or full-time) that handle public relations on for their project. There are also specialized outreach providers such as the Education branch of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado and the Education and Public Outreach Group at Sonoma State University which offer to organize a project's outreach activities on a contractual basis.
In addition to outreach by research institutions, an important part of informal science education are outreach programs such as science museums and science festivals.
Read more about this topic: Science Outreach
Famous quotes containing the words scope and, scope and/or history:
“A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities, and for no more, and none can tell whose sphere is the largest.”
—Gail Hamilton (1833–1896)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)