Astronomy is a scientific field that, through both the allure of the sky and popular culture, enjoys significant penetration into the public and especially the young. This fact along with the interdisciplinary character of the field, makes astronomy an ideal avenue for teaching basic scientific principles in a context that is both relevant to the subject and interesting to the learners.

However, communicating astronomy to the public presents certain significant challenges: (a) highly specialized scientific knowledge is disseminated to an audience of a disperse scientific background, often without extended and/or uniform scientific education and skills; (b) the audience is of a wide age range, preferences and goals regarding their pursuit of astronomy knowledge; and (c) the audience 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 ought to be more of a leisure activity rather than formal learning.

Advances in the understanding of learning processes suggest that the conventional lecture-based paradigm may be suboptimal to address such requirements. Thus current approaches focus on adult education and situational learning and are active, self-directed and experiential, with a readjustment from process to product. The emerging view is of learning as an active, constructive, social, and self-reflective process with the aim to develop problem-processing skills, self-directed learning skills and group competence. 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. Information technology and the internet are widely used to support educational processes. Although such technologies have succeeded an immense impact in information dissemination, they relatively lag in supporting active and collaborative learning.

This paper proposes new ways of engaging Web 2.0 technologies to support self-directed, experiential astronomy education for the public, enhancing the instructor’s presence and team collaboration. In specific, the paper presents the educational activities at a regional Amateur Astronomy Club that aim to disseminate the basics of astronomy and related physics to the public and especially the young. The proposed approach involves the use of wikis and blogs to entirely re-create the process of problem-based learning approach on the internet. A number of astronomy problems at various levels of difficulty and specialization are deployed on the internet. Problem deployment and presentation is collaboratively performed via the internet by a number of instructors using wiki technology. Participating students and instructors can resolve and discuss the problem via a dedicated blog, while they can record their educational experiences in their personal blogs, thus providing a way for a temporal recording of attitude, experience and skills progress. Problem solution is then performed collaboratively via a wiki. Preliminary results of a user (student and instructor) satisfaction analysis are also presented.