{"id":846,"date":"2013-06-20T22:51:56","date_gmt":"2013-06-20T12:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/?p=846"},"modified":"2013-06-20T22:55:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-20T12:55:00","slug":"science-meet-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/?p=846","title":{"rendered":"Science, meet the people!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/comment.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-847 aligncenter\" alt=\"comment\" src=\"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/comment.jpg\" width=\"250\" height=\"188\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Now that I&#8217;m getting some order into this work I can start to re-read back issues of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.britishecologicalsociety.org\/publications\/the-bulletin\/\" target=\"_blank\">BES Bulletin<\/a>. It strikes me that there&#8217;s a lot of concern in ecology, as in other sciences, with public perception and understanding. Books on the topic are becoming increasingly frequent &#8211; here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/who-speaks-for-the-climate\/\" target=\"_blank\">one I reviewed earlier<\/a>! The June 2012 bulletin listed some critical areas that needed to be addressed:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>science to inform policy-making<\/li>\n<li>sustainable food production<\/li>\n<li>natural capital<\/li>\n<li>ecology and planning\/health<\/li>\n<li>etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t the full list but you get the drift. &#8220;Science&#8221; complains that the public doesn&#8217;t understand its work and yet it fails to grasp the key point of communication that as teachers we all know: it&#8217;s about the receiver not the sender! If someone doesn&#8217;t understand you, the art is to change until they do. OK, so part of the response to this is for societies such as the BES to have a communications officer and possibly even a policy officer but that&#8217;s only half the solution.<\/p>\n<p>So, how do you communicate? I see two issues here &#8211; the basis of science which comes to us through the &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Scientific_method\" target=\"_blank\">scientific method<\/a>&#8221; and the idea of refutation via <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Karl_Popper\" target=\"_blank\">Popper<\/a>&#8216;s work. The former gives us\u00a0 a way to work; the latter suggests we are always looking for a way to disprove. It doesn&#8217;t take long to realise that anyone looking to dispute science will find it in the very method of science itself!<\/p>\n<p>What can we do? It&#8217;s a pity that so few science courses have syllabuses where communication is part of the core material (let&#8217;s face it, we&#8217;re too often just trying to get through the content!). So, following another Bulletin article (thanks to Phillip Martin for the inspiration):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Get a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter<\/a> account (mine&#8217;s @ecogeog). This is not as cutting edge as it once was &#8211; a student of mine pointed out it was now only used by really old people &#8211; at that time, anyone over the age of 25 so it&#8217;s not that much help. There&#8217;s a lot of help online (start <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/sciencecommunication\/2011\/07\/20\/why-scientists-use-twitter\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>) about getting the most out of your account but the key is to &#8220;follow&#8221; people whose views you find interesting. Start posting;<\/li>\n<li>Get a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook<\/a> page. Note it&#8217;s a page and not an account (although you&#8217;ll need one of those first. A page allows comment &#8211; why not use it to communicate to your students &#8211; but it does not allow access to your private posts (but, Facebook is often sneaky, check the <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424127887324880504578300312528424302.html\" target=\"_blank\">privacy settings<\/a>);<\/li>\n<li>Start a blog. There are numerous hosts, some paid, some free. Blogging is a briefer form of writing where thoughts can be jotted down and responded to &#8211; the aim here is to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.problogger.net\/how-to-write-great-blog-content\/\" target=\"_blank\">get readers to your site<\/a>;<\/li>\n<li>Use online tools at work, but use the social side as well. Every university has an online learning system (e.g. Blackboard, Moodle etc.) but I&#8217;m guessing most use them only as a way of getting files from a to b.\u00a0 Start interactivity &#8211; set up a forum, blog, chatroom (all very simple). Get students to post content as you talk &#8211; this means they add to the substance of the lesson\/lecture and makes them far more involved.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Is this easy? Well, yes and no. Setting them uyp takes a little time, getting them used effectively takes years mainly because these things are <em>social<\/em> and building a community takes time. But it&#8217;s worth it!!<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s some educational ideas to consider:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Get students to tweet an ecological concept;<\/li>\n<li>Run your group via a Facebook page &#8211; most students check it regularly &#8211; probably during your lesson so post things while you are talking, at least you&#8217;ll know they&#8217;re awake;<\/li>\n<li>Give students a topic and tell them to use a forum to check out possible answers. That way, most of the hard work is done before you enter the room and you can focus on the critical stuff the didn&#8217;t get (it&#8217;s called a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.knewton.com\/flipped-classroom\/\" target=\"_blank\">flipped classroom<\/a> &#8211; can be useful if not overdone);<\/li>\n<li>Tell the students to make the textbook, not read it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are masses of great ideas out there. Share some here.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Photo Credit: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/34427470616@N01\/215267578\/\">duncan<\/a> via <a href=\"http:\/\/compfight.com\">Compfight<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/2.0\/\">cc<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that I&#8217;m getting some order into this work I can start to re-read back issues of the BES Bulletin. It strikes me that there&#8217;s a lot of concern in ecology, as in other sciences, with public perception and understanding. Books on the topic are becoming increasingly frequent &#8211; here&#8217;s one I reviewed earlier! The June 2012 bulletin listed some critical areas that needed to be addressed: science to inform policy-making sustainable food production natural capital ecology and planning\/health etc. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[228,230,231,229],"class_list":["post-846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-communication","tag-facebook","tag-moodle","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":853,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions\/853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}