NASA's Stealth Year of Education on Station Thing
Keith’s note: This notice “A Year of Education on Station” appeared with no fanfare on the NASA education audience page: “September 2017 – September 2018: Although on different crews, astronauts Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold – both former teachers – will work aboard the International Space Station. K-16 students and educators can do NASA STEM activities related to the station and its role in NASA’s journey to Mars.”
Cool stuff. Another year long thing on the ISS. Too bad NASA is going out of its way not to tell anyone about this. There is no mention on the NASA.gov homepage, nothing on the main ISS page, no mention on the NASA Education page, and zero mention on the CASIS website (not a surprise since they try to ignore any mention of “NASA” these days). Nothing has appeared on @NASA, @Space_Station, @NASAedu, @astroacaba, @ISS_CASIS or @ISS_Research either.
Apparently NASA just assumes that people will find this page within NASA’s website. This is called the “if you build it they will come” approach. Or maybe people will notice that Joe Acaba has started to give out homework assignments.
I’d think that if you wanted to enlist the interest of millions of school kids and hundreds of thousands of teachers, you would want to plan ahead for something like this, and you’d probably want a big roll-out prior to the teacher’s launch, which I think was earlier this week (I don’t remember hearing about it). When I look at the website, it appears the astronaut was just arriving at Baikonur so maybe the launch hasn’t happened yet. I remember back to Barb Morgan’s projects, and really going back to the beginning, the NASA educational booklets and special publications, those large NASA facts posters on every classroom wall in the US, even a few years ago some of the ISS websites. The websites appear to be gone. I don’t remember ever seeing an ISS poster. NASA seems to offer just about nothing anymore to interest kids, teachers or schools? Maybe the astronaut will talk to one classroom, 25 kids at a time. Not too efficient. Maybe someone thinks they are getting information out in tweets?
Yes. One would think they’d plan ahead … 😉
With their sizeable communications and media organization-if they are not planning things like the Year of Education months or even years in advance, then their management is failing them.
Indeed.
What a sorry bunch they’ve become.
Does anyone here have a link to something more substantive than this “notice” that we can spread around?
I don’t think so; some of us have looked all over for the detail but have found nothing, in fact not even another reference to this at all. So it really leads one to question what its all about. Remember, NASA reduced its education budget so much over the last maybe 10 years, that education hardly exists anymore, and so much that the AA for education, Leland Melvin, quit. Now suddenly we hear about a ‘year of education’, apparently having something to do with the new teacher astronauts; its kind of like that ‘mission to Mars’ we’ve been hearing about the last few years; its a nice thought but just a figment of someone’s imagination. NASA these days seems to talk big, but do little.
Well, the link that I included above is actually the parent link to the one that Keith posted. That link actually does contain useful material that I’d heard was out there but didn’t know where. It contains actual course material dating back at least as far as 2010. Lessons, labs, and demonstration videos recorded on the ISS.
Pretty cool. We should all here share it on our respective social media presences.
My guess is that the link that Keith posted is just announcing the fact that this program will continue with another year of educator astronauts building new material and probably first-presenting it live.
Never mind, I found it…
https://www.nasa.gov/audien…
Keith, as you’ve said here on other occasions, NASA doesn’t know how to promote their stuff. However, some folks here do. We’ll try and spread the word on this.