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Antarctica
Visitors to OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center can now use iPods and similar devices as portable tour-guides during - or before - their visits.

Other recent projects of note:

Special projects

Podcasting the HMSC

Visitors to OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Visitor Center in Newport can now tune in to video tours that describe the center's exhibits, the work of HSMC researchers and what goes on behind the scenes to keep the public aquarium healthy and functioning.

The short videos, produced by Oregon Sea Grant Communications, are available as podcasts, downloadable to your personal computer, iPod or other hand-held device.

Visitors can download the videos at home to get a preview of what's in store for them - or they can check out iPods when they arrive at the Visitor Center and use them as portable guides to the center's interactive exhibits.

It's all part of a larger effort to understand more about how people learn in "free-choice" settings such as the Visitor Center. Sea Grant's Free-Choice Learning educator, Shawn Rowe, and his team of student assistants are conducting research to determine whether adding iPods to the Visitor Center mix might change or enhance learning.

Subscribe to Ocean Learning, our HMSC podcast

Bill Hanshumaker on satellite phoneBill Hanshumaker struggles to communicate by satellite phone during 2005 Antarctic expedition. Blogging the 2006 trip was a major improvement.

Blogging Antarctica

When Oregon Sea Grant marine educator Bill Hanshumaker was getting ready for his second trip to Antarctica with the NOAA-sponsored Sounds of the Southern Ocean research team, he knew he wanted to keep an on-line journal to describe the cruise and its discoveries. During the team's 2005 expedition, Hanshumaker had filed his reports by a circuitous e-mail path to OSG webmaster Pat Kight, who formatted the entries as she got them - sometimes several days late - into custom-built Web pages describing the trip. It was a laborious process, fraught with delays caused by finicky satellite-to-Internet connections and competing demands on the Sea Grant webmaster's time.

This time around, Kight suggested a more direct route: Blogging.

Blogs (originally "web logs") are Web-based journals that make it easy for users to post their own updates to pre-formatted Web pages, with the opportunity for reader interaction via comments. While early blogs were mainly personal diaries, the medium has rapidly grown to encompass more than 60 million specialized blogs covering every subject imaginable, from the serious to the whimsical, and science blogs are a growing category. Free or low-cost blogging services take much of the work out of everything from page layout to archiving, making Web publishing available to those who don't have the time or interest to learn to build their own sites.

Once the blog was set up, it took Hanshumaker no time at all to learn to compose and post articles, along with maps and photographs, to his new blog to set the scene for the trip.

Things were slightly more complicated once the team arrived in Antarctica.

"The challenge was the lack of satellite coverage from the Southern Ocean," Hanshumaker explains. "In 2005, none of the messages sent from aboard the Russian research vessel reached our Webmaster. This year transmission was better, but the per-kilobyte transmission charge was still pretty high."

When Hanshumaker was unable to connect directly to the blog site, he e-mailed his expedition journal entries and low-resolution versions of his Antarctic photos to the Sea Grant Webmaster, who logged in to the blog and posted them almost as soon as they arrived.

Antartica posed other communication challenges, Hanshumaker recalls. "The weather is so cold that rechargeable batteries for my cameras and laptop rapidly lose their charge. Last year I would put the frozen battery in my armpit to warm it back to its charged state; this year, I brought two sets of batteries.

"We also tried to use satellite phones to communicate in real-time with radio stations back home in Oregon, but the satellites dipped below the horizon so quickly it was difficult to remain connected longer than 5 minutes."

Back home in Oregon, Hanshumaker has been using the Antarctic blog as source material for public education and outreach efforts including auditorium presentations, service club and professional conference meetings, and the development of an interactive kiosk exhibit at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center, where he is based.

Oregon Sea Grant, meanwhile, is exploring the possibilities which blogging and other Web technology - from podcasts to wikis to on-line photo galleries - offer for supporting its marine research and outreach efforts.

"Small programs like ours don't have the technological or human resources to build everything from scratch," says Kight, who is active in the nationwide network of NOAA/Sea Grant Web developers. "Where we can find appropriate technology from the marketplace at a reasonable cost and without compromising program values, it can help us in our mission to bring reliable, science-based information to the public at large."

Hanshumaker agrees. "The blog has tremendous potential both as a Web development and public education tool. Being able to hear critical comments from the public in real time helps in the formative evaluation process. Providing the public voice with a forum promotes their support for our efforts."

The Antarctic blog experience has led Sea Grant Communications to develop its own blog, Breaking Waves, as a means of distributing news and information about Sea Grant's research, outreach and education mission. Readers can subscribe to the blog's feed to receive short announcements of grant and fellowship opportunities, publications and videos, conferences and other Sea Grant projects. And Sea Grant faculty members are getting the blogging fever, too - Extension water specialist Rob Emanuel, for instance, has launched H2ONCoast to discuss issues of water quality, supply and hazards on Oregon's North Coast.

More information

Other recent projects of note:

Exploring Beach Recovery

How do beaches recover after storms? Until very recently, natural beach recovery was poorly understood. Tuba Ozkan-Haller and Merrick Haller bring their own beach to the Hinsdale Wave Research Lab at Oregon State University to learn more about this process. Equipped with an arsenal of state-of-the-art electronic sensors, remote cameras, and 1000 yards of sand, they hope to develop new tools that can help predict how beaches will recover.

Wave Power: The Potential of Oregon's Ocean Energy

The United States consumes more electricity than any other country in the world. More than half of that energy is produced from nonrenewable fossil fuels. A clean, renewable and readily available source of electric power would be a great environmental and economic asset. Some forward-thinking scientists believe we need look no further than the pent-up energy in the ocean waves that constantly pound the nation's shores.

Supported in part by program development funds from Oregon Sea Grant, engineering faculty and students at Oregon State University have been working to develop the concepts and tests for an emerging wave energy technology. Their work is captured in a new 12-minute DVD that demonstrates the enthusiasm growing around this potential power source.

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Last updated: Aug. 3, 2007