Lynda Kelly, #ASTEN16, MusDigi, 18 November 2016

ASTEN is the Australasian Science and Technology Exhibitors Network, and they had their annual (?) meeting this week at SciTech in hot and sunny Perth, Western Australia.

A key focus of the meeting was evaluation with two really great keynote speakers, Mark McCrindle of McCrindle with great insights into audience trends and visual communication, and Dr Karen Murcia, Curtin University, discussing measuring social impact of science centres and re-visiting some fundamentals of evaluation which I enjoyed very much.

There were also interesting discussions around teacher PD and engaging with teachers, so I was somewhat surprised that there was no Twitter activity. At all! And, especially given that we know Twitter is a major platform used by teachers for communication, sharing and PD.

Anyway, we (well, Peter Mahoney and me) took it on ourselves to populate the backchannel using the hashtag #ASTEN16. I made two stories from our tweets as follows:

#ASTEN16 – Day One tweets
#ASTEN16 – Part 2 (Day Two tweets)

However, I shouldn’t be too mean as they do have a somewhat active Facebook page – so follow them there.

Also took the chance to meet with folks at the Western Australian Museum hearing all about the new museum project – very exciting and can’t wait to see it in 2020, well, sometime in 2020 anyway!