Unconference sessions
Matt Brown
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 09:41 UTC
In the afternoon, we’ve set aside three parallel ‘unconference’ sessions. They work like this.
At breakfast coffee, we’ll have a big whiteboard or flip chart upon which you can volunteer yourself to give a talk or lead a discussion on a topic of your choice (i.e. one not covered in the main programme).
At morning break and lunch, delegates will then vote for their preferred talks.
The three with the most votes will be slotted in to the unconference sessions.
Ahead of the big day, we can use this thread to bounce a few ideas around.
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Maxine,
This is an important topic and I think the way to go with this is through anecdotes of success stories. If you take polls you will probably get responses averaging neutral or negative. The issue is much larger than how can science blogging be beneficial to the scientist but covers all non-traditional forms of scholarship.Katherine – good luck with your presentation! Hopefully you’ll share your talk or slides.
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in the media in general, and the blogosphere in particular, themes rise, get amplified and disappear again in a rapid timeframe. We see again and again storms in a teacup rising, and fading to be replaced by the newest talking point. Underlying this is an ongoing conversation. How do we extract this conversation and see the trends that are happening there?
Another topic I am interested in is the distinction between science 2 science blogging and science 2 public blogging and the cases which lie in between.
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I could do something to do with educational psychology, ‘Learning by Blogging’ sound interesting? Suggestions welcome…
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I love that “how to capture the storms in the teacups” topic, Ian.
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I agree with Ian, a discussion about how blogging affects the wider discussions of science, especially in the months and years after the excitement surrounding a particular issue or event has died down, would be useful. In most cases within a few weeks of a blog post going up it will be difficult for people not familiar with the science or the debate to find the information, or even be aware that it’s there.
The quality of arguments, and the evidence underpinning them, in science blogs is at times superior to those in online resources provided by organizations involved in campaigning on scientific issues. This is not to denigrate the efforts of these organizations, since they usually have very few staff to collate and write new information. I don’t think there can be any doubt that resources which can be searched with relative ease by non-scientists perform an important role.
As science blogging expands can more be done to ensure that the best science blogging feeds back into online resources provided by “pro-science” campaigns?
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Brain Duck – I think the session you are proposing might have some overlap with one that Martin Fenner et al are leading, titled “Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools.” Martin describes the session and asks for suggestions here.
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We get accused of preaching to the choir a lot. I’d love to see (and happy to facilitate) a discussion on how what we can do to improve our skills at reaching out to the broader public.
Or have the broader public reach out to us? I think that might (or could) be covered in the first session, Panel: The scientific life, exposed. if the panel people wanted it.
Topics I’d like to see covered at some point during the day, may not need an unconference session:
- the relationship between you, your institution and your blog – how much are you speaking for them, should they care (either encourage or discourage) whether you blog, etc
- experience of academic science bloggers versus industrial science bloggers (if any exist)
- the limits of blogging – what blogs can and can’t do, should and shouldn’t be used to do. What is it reasonable to expect a blog to do/solve?
- how sciencey does a science blog have to be? (which I suspect will be covered in the first panel session)
and there was something else but I’ve gone and forgotten it.
I’m no expert on… anything… really but can facilitate audience discussions and have chaired panel discussions, should that be helpful.
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Rather than thinking about how to reach a “broader public”, as one commenter put it, the power of blogging is the ability to reach a narrow segment of the population with specific interests. CNN.com and other big outlets can worry about reaching a big audience.
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If there is any interest (and I know some of the protagonists will be at the meeting) I’d like to do a rant on why we have so many ‘Facebook for Scientists’ clones and wthen move on to a practical (and positive!) discussion about what we might actually do about it. Blogged about this recently here and here
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Cameron, I would love to talk about this topic – the proliferation of science social websites and what to do about it.
Maybe we could make this session a little bit more technical and also talk about APIs, etc.
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