This thesis presents four case studies from the Finnish museum sector that are using mobile technologies in diverse ways to enhance the museum experience. At the National Museum of Finland, the mobile solution functions as an aid for providing translations in different languages and thus improving the aesthetic appearance of the exhibition. At Tampere Art Museum, the outdoors mobile tour extends the museum visit outside the physical walls of the building. At Helsinki City Museum the mobile phone is perceived as a communication tool. At Luostarinmäki Handicrafts Museum the Augmented Reality game combines digital narrative with real-world events, creating a solution that is both entertaining and informative.   These solutions are analysed in terms of the Contextual Model, developed by Falk and Dierking. The model divides the museum visit into three overlapping and interacting spheres – personal, social and physical. This thesis looks at how mobile solutions may enhance or hinder the museum experience in regards to each of these three spheres. Additionally, the model is compared with the results of a visitor research conducted at the National Museum of Finland in October 2013. The aim of the thesis is to identify the most successful features of these solutions and to explore how the field could be developed in the future.

Understanding the short-and long-term impacts of a biomonitoring and exposure project and reporting personal results back to study participants is critical for guiding future efforts, especially in the context of environmental justice. The purpose of this study was to evaluate learning outcomes from environmental communication efforts and whether environmental health literacy goals were met in an environmental justice community. We conducted 14 interviews with parents who had participated in the University of Arizona's Metals Exposure Study in Homes and analyzed their responses using NVivo, a qualitative data management and analysis program. Key findings were that participants used the data to cope with their challenging circumstances, the majority of participants described changing their families' household behaviors, and participants reported specific interventions to reduce family exposures. The strength of this study is that it provides insight into what people learn and gain from such results communication efforts, what participants want to know, and what type of additional information participants need to advance their environmental health literacy. This information can help improve future report back efforts and advance environmental health and justice.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka Trelleborgs Museums kommunikativa aspekter utifrån de unga vuxnas förutfattade meningar, tankar och idéer kring museet i fråga och ifall dessa idéer förändras eller förblir dem samma efter att ungdomarna fått besöka museet. Publikundersökningen i denna studie har lyckats måla upp en generell bild av situationen, med hjälp av fyra gruppintervjuer med unga vuxna mellan 16–25 år och genom användningen av teorier om identitet, inlärning i museer och fysisk kontext. Studiens resultat har visat att det finns en omfattande negativ känsla kring staden Trelleborg på grund av det bristande kulturlivet för unga vuxna. Som en del av staden hamnar även Trelleborgs Museum under denna negativa skuggan, då de unga vuxnas engagemang med museet är knappt existerande. Dock överträffar museet och dess utställningar ungdomarnas förväntningar. Studien har även visat att museets fysiska kontext har en anmärkningsvärd inverkan på hur ungdomarna upplever museet. Det finns trots allt skillnader mellan de intervjuade i hur museer betraktas av de unga vuxna och när och varför de besöks av ungdomar inom den studerade målgruppen. / The purpose with this study is to investigate Trelleborgs Museums communicative aspects from the young adults' preconceptions, thoughts and ideas about the museum in question and if these thoughts changes or remain the same after that the youngsters have visited the museum. The public research in this study has succeeded to paint a general picture of the situation, with the help of four group-interviews with participants between 16–25 years and using theories of identity, museum learning and physical context. The results of this study have shown that there is a general negative feeling above the city of Trelleborg due to its lack of cultural life for young adults. As part of the city, even Trelleborgs Museum falls under this dark shadow of negativity, since the young adults’ engagement with the museum is barely present. Though, the museum and its exhibitions beat the youngsters’ expectations. The study has also shown that the physical context of the museum has a notable impact on how the youngsters experience the museum. There are after all differences between the interviewed in terms of how museums are considered by the young adults and when and why they are being visited by youngsters in the studied target group.

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Research by a number of scholars working with different data has shown validity for a contextual model of relationships whereby a person's background characteristics affects or predicts her/his interpersonal style, which then affects or predicts her/his relationship satisfaction. This study tests if this relationship model is equivalent across four different cultural samples. This research also presents descriptive family data on a sample from Micronesia, a culture that has not previously been described in family science literature, compared to three other cultural groups. A total of 550 individuals from Micronesian (N=131), Hispanic-Americans (N=139), Non-LDS Caucasians (N=140), and LDS-Caucasians (N=140) filled out an extensive relationship assessment survey (RELATE). Descriptive and diagnostic data will be provided for each of the items and constructs in the data for each of the four samples. Comparisons between the samples on categorical variables show many unique patterns. The Micronesian and US samples especially show a number of patterns that were unique from the other samples. This test of the contextual model shows that the model seemed to work in general for all four cultural samples, although the specific items within different parts of the model seemed to show unique patterns in the various cultures.

This thesis deals with the aspect of outdoor education of chemistry in the context of the natural science literacy concept. This concept is approximated here in association with the curricula documents for secondary education level and the Contextual model of learning. Based on the description of individual contexts of the aforementioned model, an alternative variant of an excursion to the Prague Waterworks Museum in Podolí is proposed. The practical part focuses on the comparison of the efficiency of the "classic" conception of a museum excursion and the alternative approach mentioned previously. The whole concept adheres to the pedagogical experimental scheme. The comparison is achieved through three testings in two groups. The first, control group, had a standard excursion led by a museum guide. The second, experimental group, had an excursion led in the proposed alternative approach. Based on the first tests - the pretests, the starting knowledge of the pupils is analyzed. The second testing is executed as posttests right after finishing each excursion. The third testing is a retention test one month after the excursion. Test results were analyzed using statistical methods. The results of the analysis point to the considerable importance of the way the excursion is led and to the great benefit of...

Ce travail concerne l'interprétation du contenu des images aériennes optiques panchromatiques très haute résolution. Deux méthodes pour la classification du contenu de ces images ont été développées. Une méthode basée sur la détection des instances des différentes catégories d'objets et une autre méthode basée sur la segmentation sémantique des superpixels de l'image utilisant un modèle de contexte entre les différentes instances des superpixels. La méthode de détection des objets dans une image très haute résolution est basée sur l'apprentissage d'un mélange de modèle d'apparence de la catégorie d'objets à détecter puis d'une fusion des hypothèses renvoyées par les différents modèles. Nous proposons une méthode de partitionnement en sous catégories visuelles basée sur une procédure en deux étapes des exemples d'apprentissages de la base en fonction des métadonnées disponibles et de l'apparence des exemples d'apprentissage. Cette phase de partitionnement permet d'apprendre des modèles d'apparence où chacun est spécialisés dans la reconnaissance d'une sous-partie de la base et dont la fusion permet la généralisation de la détection à l'ensemble des objets de la classe. Les performances du détecteur ainsi obtenu sont évaluées sur plusieurs bases d'images aériennes très haute résolution à des résolution différentes et en plusieurs endroits du monde. La méthode de segmentation sémantique contextuelle développée utilise une combinaison de la description visuelle d'un superpixel extrait d'une image et des informations de contexte extraient entre un superpixel et ses voisins. La représentation du contexte entre les superpixels est obtenu en utilisant une représentation par modèle graphique entre les superpixels voisins. Les noeuds du graphes étant la représentation visuelle d'un superpixel et les arêtes la représentation contextuelle entre deux voisins. Enfin nous présentons une méthode de prédiction de la catégorie d'un superpixel en fonction des décisions données par les voisins pour rendre les prédictions plus robustes. La méthode a été testé sur une base d'image aérienne très haute résolution. / This work is about interpretation of the content of very high resolution aerial optical panchromatic images. Two methods are proposed for the classification of this kind of images. The first method aims at detecting the instances of a class of objects and the other method aims at segmenting superpixels extracted from the images using a contextual model of the relations between the superpixels. The object detection method in very high resolution images uses a mixture of appearance models of a class of objects then fuses the hypothesis returned by the models. We develop a method that clusters training samples into visual subcategories based on a two stages procedure using metadata and visual information. The clustering part allows to learn models that are specialised in recognizing a subset of the dataset and whose fusion lead to a generalization of the object detector. The performances of the method are evaluate on several dataset of very high resolution images at several resolutions and several places. The method proposed for contextual semantic segmentation use a combination of visual description of a superpixel extract from the image and contextual information gathered between a superpixel and its neighbors. The contextual representation is based on a graph where the nodes are the superpixels and the edges are the relations between two neighbors. Finally we predict the category of a superpixel using the predictions made by of the neighbors using the contextual model in order to make the prediction more reliable. We test our method on a dataset of very high resolution images.

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Hobby activities can be viewed through the lens of informal, free-choice learning. A wide range of hobbies combine fun and learning-intensive practices, and can contribute to scientific literacy. Hobby learning involves clear goal orientation, persistence and effort, and often results in more richly and strongly connected knowledge; traits highly valued in both in and out-of-school science learning. In this study, I used koi hobbyists as subjects to discover and explore hobbyists' information-seeking strategies under different learning scenarios. I approached koi hobbyists' learning about koi and their koi hobby in both quantitative and qualitative ways. I designed a Stage of Engagement Model to illustrate koi hobbyists' engagement with their hobby, and adapted Falk and Dierking's Contextual Model of Learning to explain how personal, socio-cultural and physical contextual factors affect koi hobbyists' learning. An instrument was developed to assess koi hobbyists' experience with keeping koi, knowledge about the hobby, motivation/goals, interaction with other hobbyists, and the information-seeking strategies they used under different learning scenarios. I administered this questionnaire to koi hobbyist communities in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and online. Based on the quantitative analysis, the results supported my hypotheses that koi hobbyists chose different information-seeking strategies based on personal contextual factors such as previous experience, motivation and learning goals; socio-cultural contextual factors such as interactions with other koi hobbyists; and physical contextual factors such as the nature of the problems they encounter. Koi hobbyists also chose different information-seeking strategies based upon their stage of engagement with their hobby. The long-term potential of this study is to offer insights into how learners construct their knowledge by applying different learning strategies under different personal, socio-cultural and physical circumstances, and to provide a framework for the future study of other kinds of hobbies and hobbyists that will help to promote public scientific literacy. / Graduation date: 2012

In the framework of this master s thesis there has been developed a training programme named "Through the Desert and the Prairie". It is focused on selected mammals and their geographical distribution and habitat. It includes a set of didactic materials and tools for the individual activity of a teacher at the Hluboká Zoo designed for a group of pupils from the 2nd to 5th grade of elementary school. In the work, the objectives, importance and advantages of education in zoos, including the focus on the Hluboká Zoo, are described. It also introduces the biogeography teaching as a part of the Framework Education Programme for Elementary Education, with different concepts of this subject and contextual model of learning. After the brief characteristics of mammals and their anatomy, depending on the environment, more detailed information on selected mammals follows. The created file contains information and tools, which directly on the spot, at the individual mammals exhibits, illustrate their characteristics, interests and adaptation to the environment in which they live. It also describes methodological instructions for teachers and also contains a worksheet including the key. It also includes a map of the zoo with marked key locations of the educational programme. The whole file will be available at the zoo box office. The prior preparation using the materials on the zoo website is also possible.