These three fields are distinct entities, with their own training, traditions, audiences and goals, but must they be as separate as they are? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each field and what can we learn from each other? With a shared goal of encouraging scientific understanding and literacy, we'll explore the ways teachers, science writers, museum educators and more can work together.
Questions:
- "What do you think holds back collaborations between teachers, science writers, museum educators and others interested in science outreach and education?"
- "What examples have you seen or experienced working across boundaries in formal science education, informal science education and science writing?"
- "What would be effective tools/methods to use to foster collaboration between different groups interested in scientific outreach?"
When it comes to writing about health and medicine, we all want to be the smartest kid in the room, but no one likes a show off, and scientists don't always like to hear their work criticized. Explore how to find flaws in studies, be skeptical, and include important context that separates you from scaremongerers (OMG this new bug is going to kill us all!) and practitioners of "gee-whiz" (this will be on the market in two years and cure diabetes!). And learn how to do that so the scientists who read your stuff end up with more respect for you, not less.
Questions:
- What are some mistakes veteran science writers learned from when first writing about medical studies?
- How do you ask the right questions about studies without being an expert in everything?
- How do you write critically but respectfully about studies so you don't alienate authors?
- How do you find a biostatistician to keep in your back pocket?
As science writers, we work hard to snag readers and keep them reading. But there are writers out there whose examples can help us but go ignored because they write in what some disdainfully calls "genre." We're talking thrillers, mysteries, adventure, romance, police novels, sci-fi, historical fiction. There's a reason why Patrick O'Brian, Jack Patterson, Ray Bradbury, and Anne Perry have sold millions of books: The best of them have developed narrative methods and techniques — call 'em tricks if it makes you feel better — that quicken readers' attention, efficiently establish scene and character, and move narrative at whatever speeds best suits the story. Some are downright innovative. We science writers face the same problems. How do we switch between narrative strands? How do we lay down one strand so it can be picked up easily later? How do we jump from one time to another, embed exposition within scene, or describe natural forces? How can we solve the problem that tormented Chekhov, that of getting someone in and out of a room? In this workshoppy session, David Dobbs (secret passions: detective novels, Elmore Leonard, and the Aubrey-Maturin series) and Maryn McKenna (mystery writers Dorothy Sayers and Anne Perry, and YA fantasy authors you've never heard of) will unpick how these tricks work and how you can use them too. Maryn McKenna is a columnist for Scientific American and the author of Superbug and Beating Back the Devil. David Dobbs freelances for the New York Times, National Geographic, Nature, and other outlets and is writing his fifth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion. Their blogs, Superbug and Neuron Culture, are both at Wired.
How do we teach the teachers? Science educators at all levels need to hear the "inside baseball", the historical context and other interconnections which is too often dismissed as background information of little public interest. Moreover, in physics and increasingly in other fields, "context" means "mathematics", and how do we engage our audience and convey accurate information when numbers are scary? None of the existing venues for online science communication are right for this: magazines are constrained, and blogs are largely swayed, by what's topical. OpenCourseWare is scattered and of uneven quality and coverage. We need to take the ethos of the "explainer" to its logical extreme. Suppose you, Dr. Scientist, have to teach a class on your professional area to first- or second-year undergrads. You need, at a minimum, texts, but nowadays you'll also need simulation codes, sample datasets on which to practice analysis, primary literature to assign as reading.... Can you find all you need from Open-Access sources on the Web? Would you know where to look? Is there just one place to go where everything is there for you, curated and mapped? In the year 2013, why not?
Questions:
- Who could host such a thing?
- Who'd pay for it?
- How do we give it the stamp of professional respectability?
- How do we integrate it into the existing science communication ecosystem?
Written stories, from features in National Geographic to blogs on Wordpress, are the bread and butter of the science online community. There's a staggering amount of diversity within that textual world, but many stories can bust out of pure text. They can live, and grow and be way more awesome when you add a little something extra. Maybe that's a podcast, or a graphic that explains what's going on. Maybe it's a slideshow, or an animation. Maybe it's a simple timeline, to clear up the order of events. Maybe it's taking that tiny nugget of the story and turning it into a cartoon. The same is true of lectures, videos and podcasts. You have words in the script, yes, but there's also lighting, sound, intonation and even the pauses between -- all powerful and vastly underutilized tools for communication. Whatever it might be, this session hopes to help you think about building out - beyond text and into the magical non-textual world. Participants will discuss examples of where build outs have worked and failed, and be able to brainstorm their own projects. The session will be predominantly theoretical, but tools to accomplish those build-outs will also be touched upon. Session attendees will walk away with a sense for the possibilities that are out there for giving their text some miracle-grow.
Questions:
- You story is really cool, but it could be cooler. How can you push your story further? How do you think beyond text?
- You wrote a story. Yay! Now what about the data, graphics, interactives, podcasts, slideshows, interpretive dances and more?
- We have roughly 2500 years experience with stagecraft (at minimum). How can we apply that to science lectures?
Citizen science describes science-society collaborations that span a wide spectrum of activities under many different names, disciplines, scales, physical places around the world, and places in history. Citizen science is also called volunteer science, community-based research, street science, do-it-yourself (DIY) science, public participation in scientific research (PPSR), participatory science, web-mapping, crowd-sourcing, and more. It can be global and exclusively online via games and solving puzzles, crowd-sourcing information, or data transcription. It can be exclusively offline, such as connecting people with nature or science locally. Most commonly, citizen science involves people collecting or observing in their real world geo-referenced location and submitting the information into an online database via computer or mobile technology. From astronomy to zoology and conservation to urban planning, citizen science allows professionals and amateurs to co-produce knowledge. Session moderators will provide historic and modern-day context of citizen science and review the scope of projects and platforms/technologies that provide new frontiers for citizen science.
Questions:
- Only collecting data? What scope of activities/projects qualify as #citizenscience? #scio13
- Only helping scientists? Managers, urban planners, claims adjusters…who uses the data? #scio13 #citizenscience
- #citizenscience isn’t new: what frontiers do communication technologies open for citizen science? #scio13
- Is knowledge co-produced via #citizenscience more special than knowledge via regular sci method? #scio13
- What disciplines/professionals are involved in #citizenscience? #scio13
- What types of story angles emerge from each #citizenscience project? #scio13
- How are participants recruited for #citizenscience projects?
- Can we trust #citizenscience data? #scio13
- Beyond peer-reviewed outcomes of co-produced knowledge, where to dig for #citizenscience stories? #scio13
- Is a scientific result more/less newsworthy if it came about from #citizenscience methods? #scio13
- What online tools/platforms enable #citizenscience engagement in hypotheses, protocols, data collection, data sharing, analyses? #scio13
- Evaluating select #citizenscience tools/platforms: what are their benefits/ limitations?
Press releases are becoming an increasingly powerful force in driving online science coverage. Even the best science writers use them to inspire articles and provide background information. However, they have also been implicated in some egregious examples of science communication, where problems with the publicity have received more attention than the science itself. This session will discuss how press releases should be improved, focusing on the needs of science writers.
Questions:
- What are the minimum requirements for a good press release?
- How can we make press releases — which are generally one-size-fits-all — useful for news organizations with vastly different practices?
- Is there a way to make the process more efficient for both PIOs and reporters?
- Do writers prefer to have information given under embargo and if so, how much time is preferred?
- Should attempts be made to explain the importance of a result, or is there too much potential for hype?
- How useful are quotes in press releases?
- How useful is it for PIOs to provide independent experts for comment and context?
- How much effort should be spent producing deeper context or background in case longer articles are being considered?
- What do reporters think of alternatives to the standard press release? E.g. just posting a title, lede, quotes and a link to the paper?
- What about stopping traditional press releases & instead advertizing blog articles with social media? What are some other alternatives?
