Astronomy Education for the Public via Web Technologies: From the e-Library, through the e-Classroom, towards the e-Facilitator

Astronomy, through both the allure of the sky and popular culture, enjoys significant penetration into the public and especially the young. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary character of the field makes it an ideal avenue for teaching basic scientific principles in a context that is both relevant to the subject and interesting to the learners. Nevertheless, communicating astronomy to the public presents certain significant challenges: (a) highly specialized scientific knowledge needs to be disseminated to an audience of a disperse scientific background, often without extended and/or uniform scientific education and skills; (b) the audience is widely dispersed in age, preferences and goals regarding their pursuit of astronomy knowledge; and (c) the audience, consisting mostly of volunteer adults, has a diverse daily time-schedule while scattered over a region considerably larger than a university campus. Most importantly, considering the amateur, sideline nature of public astronomy education, the whole educational procedure needs to be a leisure activity rather than formal learning. Thus in contemporary physical science and astronomy education, educational programs increasingly include problem-based learning and other small group instructional models, collaborative organizations to support student-faculty interactions, and technology-enhanced educational tools. This paper seeks to propose new ways of engaging emerging web technologies to support self-directed, experiential astronomy education for the public. While the collaborative e-classroom is a reality even for the educational activities at a regional Amateur Astronomy Club, prospects exist for a more radical paradigm shift. The semantic Web, with natural language search, recommendation agents and other emerging artificial intelligence tools emphasize machine facilitated understanding of the available information, further streamlining the role of the collaborating facilitator in a problem based learning scenario. Furthermore microformats, modular applications and ubiquitous connectivity for the first time provide a platform that can really claim to offer a fully realized learning experience, available anytime, everywhere.