outreach

Alice Bell comments on the non-interactivity of the most common means of science popularization: "Science on TV: it's not dumb, but it could be smarter".

I especially worry that science is often rendered as something to be simply consumed by the public. If we're using the metaphor of scientific "literacy", it's "read-only" research. Retelling science for explanatory or entertainment purposes might give us a great picture of what the scientific idea looks like but often removes a lot about how the scientists got to these conclusions. It doesn't show the workings of science or share the more slippery science-in-the-making, meaning it's harder to critique or get involved with (or simply enjoy these processes as entertaining and educational in themselves). I'd like to see an attempt to share the means of production of science, not just sell its products.

I note that actually participating in science is what we do in education. Transforming a television program from a passive experience to an active one would help transform its nature from informative to educational.

We can equally come at this from the other side. Why not take education and make broader use of storytelling, filming, and multimedia resources? Frozen Planet and other BBC productions have done much to show how technological progress in filming and broadcasting have enabled cinema-like qualities in long-form TV documentaries. These technologies are also transforming the classroom. We won't have cinema-quality, highly-edited classroom productions, not without a radical reallocation of effort and resources on the part of faculty. But we can produce material that would have been broadcast quality several years ago, and we can make it available anywhere the internet goes.

The trick is maintaining, or even increasing, the level of interactivity as we engage larger numbers of students online, potentially across multiple institutions and the public. I have some ideas for that, some of which will be rolling out over the next few months.

Two experts on social policy from the London School of Economics comment on the importance of blogging and public outreach for academics, in an interview reporting the startup of a new public policy blog.

One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up – one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities. So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.

Nature this week profiles [1] my University of Wisconsin-Madison colleague Bassam Shakhashiri, now president of the American Chemical Society. Around here he is most famous for his activism in science education and outreach, which goes back many years. The profile discusses how Shakhashiri started in education:

Science education should aim to share the beauty, challenges and rewards of open enquiry and help people to avoid sham, quackery and unproven conjecture. Interacting with students deepens my own understanding of science and of the process of learning science. When I joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a faculty member in 1970, my mission was to improve undergraduate chemistry education for all students, not just for science majors. In 1984, I became the assistant director for science and engineering education at the US National Science Foundation, after those programmes were almost phased out early in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. I rebuilt the programmes and created new ones. When I returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1990, I worked on science-literacy initiatives that focused on classroom instruction and the public appreciation of science.

He gives an amazing show, full of chemical and physical tricks. It is so interesting how masters of science education and outreach leverage the advantages of their fields to find different ways to hit broader audiences. A chemist like Shakhashiri can do tricks like a magician on a stage; an astronomer like Neil deGrasse Tyson (recently profiled by Carl Zimmer) can take people on a virtual voyage through the universe. A physicist like Brian Greene can twist space or look inward to the smallest particles; a neurologist like Oliver Sacks can bring you on rounds to hear the stories of the strangest patients.

References

Christie Wilcox makes a case that every lab should be doing science outreach on social media: "Social media for scientists Part 1: It's our job, and Part 2: You do have time. Her rationale is worth spreading:

Yes, part of the solution to this problem is to invest in better education. But even assuming we do that, we are ignoring the millions of Americans who are no longer in school. We can make the next generation more scientifically literate, but we have to consider the current generations, too. Adults over age of 35 never learned about stem cells, nanotechnology or climate change in school, so they depend on the media to learn what they need to know. These are the people who vote. They are the ones whose taxes pay for scientific funding. We need to reach out to them, and to do that we need their trust.

I'm not sure social media are necessarily the best way for most labs to make an impact on the public. You may do better working with other institutions, or by going into a collective with other labs. I know that one great way to increase your lab's profile is to get your department or program to set up a group blog, where the lab's home page is one contributor along with other labs. Two new posts a month, as Wilcox suggests, is a good start for a single lab but won't drive much interest; weekly or biweekly posts by a group of five labs would build much more attention.