Goodbye

This blog is no longer active. The course it supported has ended for the year, and we are unlikely to use blog-based communication for 2007-8.

We keep it online as a useful archive. Use the labels to get about. Click on student post and you'll find pieces written by students who took the course. Class summary will take you through the course content, (backwards) lecture by lecture. Other labels are more thematic - such as museums, climate change or dialogue - and reflect both topics the course aims to cover and the subjects students that year happened to find interesting. It's also worth scrolling down to find some links to other similar courses and science communication organisations.

If you are interested in taking the course in the future, please go to this page at Imperial College's Humanities Programme.

class 20: revision

Sarah started this class by writing up a blank timeline: 1985 at one end of the whiteboard, 2007 at the other. She asked the class to tell her where major developments in science communication would go within it. PUS, and events such as the Bodmer report ended up at one end, with PEST at the other. You might find the overview on this page a neat summary.

I then tried to synthesise some of the rest of term one in reference to a sightly 'sensational' story on bird flu. To quote Gregory and Miller on this topic:

sensationalism and gee-whizzary... [is] not a punishment inflicted on science stories by disdainful or malicious journalists. It arises in science journalism because of the rhetorical conventions of popularization (Gregory & Miller, 1998, 116-7)

This points us towards thinking about news values, and other contextual differences between the cultures producing news language and those constructing scientific discourse. It's also worth thinking about the specific context of the issue covered - are stories on MMR a different case from 'Climate Porn'?

In some ways linked to this, I also discussed questions around science and fiction. I went through the opinions of a variety of thinkers on the topic (e.g. Russell Stannard, Joan Solomon, Rosalind Haynes) and emphasised that students should take a developed approach to considering audience effects (an issue which is worth keeping in mind across the course)

Sarah then put some of term two together, by considering each of the specific media we've looked at.

• Museums
• The Internet
• Popular Science
• Documentary
• Education

She asked the class to list specific issues relating to these media, and what topics (such as boundary work, structure, interactivity, etc) might be an issue across them.

class 19: education

Firstly, thanks for all your essays - we'll get them back to you as soon as we can. I look forward to reading them.

This session acted partly as an introduction to the topic of school-science, but also as a revision of key issues in the history of thought on the Public Understanding of Science, which is important as we approach the exam.

We discussed the introduction of this new GCSE, and the general movement in school-science to build a curriculum based on what "everybody needs to know" rather than just what people training to be scientists should learn. A move away from training and towards PUS, or thinking about science "consumers" rather than the "producers". That last metaphor is from Martin Hollis at the QCA, see handout on WebCT for reference, please note he means engaged, 'empowered' consumers, not passive, manipulated ones. Specially, we were talking about English school-science, but the issues involved are applicable abroad.

We discussed how infrequently children are asked their own opinion as children, especially on science issues, but that the change in curriculum was going to involve bringing opinion into the classroom, moving to teach more about science than simply scientific content, training people up to be able to "engage" in all the PEST-based dialogue places such as the Dana centre run.

The second half of the class was an activity where groups in role as local business, the university sector, patents teachers or students considered what a change in school-science might involve. I asked each group whether they wanted to change or not, and although there were some very thoughtful pros and cons, overall you seemed against the change.

If anyone's interested in the interactions between stakeholders in education, it's worth looking at this report (n.b. links to pdf).

Popular Science magazine (online)

Image from here

The internet has revolutionised the way in which information is propagated to the mass audience, creating a communication web which encompasses the whole world. As a result, Newspapers, Magazines, Television Channels etc all have an associated website through which communication can continue, and Popular Science Magazine is no exception. I had a look through their website, to determine how effective and indeed engaging the site was.

My overall impression of the website was very positive, as it is well presented and entices you to have a look around. The home page includes their top articles from each of the different sections; How2.0, Science, Aviation and Space & Technology, as well as a PopSci blog section which instantly caught my eye. Navigation through the website is very simple, with the articles are clearly laid out in their respective categories. The articles themselves are from a varied range of topics, and in my opinion pitched at the right level for lay persons to understand. Links are available for further understanding on the topic.

I particularly liked the blog entry based on Laser tagging and graffiti technology (pictured), which enabled a building in Rotterdam to be used as a massive Etch-a-Sketch board.

Aminur Rahman

The Last Word

Everyweek in the New Scientist magazine I always end up skipping straight to the ‘Last Word’ column. The ‘Last Word’ is a small section of the magazine in which scientist from across the world try to answer questions from members of the public. These can vary from intelligent questions which are quite difficult to answer such as;

Why is it when two people walk together they often subconsciously start to walk in a synchronised manner?

To highly amusing, silly questions such as;

Why is snot green?

The highlights of the ‘Last Word’ column were, last year, made into a highly successful book aptly named ‘Does anything eat wasps?’ This was so well received by the general public that the follow-up ‘Why don’t penguins feet freeze?’ has just been released.

Even though these books are presented in a light-hearted and jovial manner I believe they actually represent a very good piece of science communication and further aid the publics understanding of science.

Why? One might ask. It is precisely this type of informal scientific writing which intrigues those who relish wit, insight and scientific curiosity, yet may not want to read the complex, and sometimes slightly boring articles in the New Scientist or Nature. These books are definitely a ‘wise, weird and wacky compendium that is guaranteed to amaze, inform and delight.’

Chris McLeod

howstuffworks.com

How Stuff Works is an informative and easy to understand website which answers day to day questions to more complicated, specialised questions. It covers a wide range of areas including Health, Money, Science and Travel just to name a few. These categories are then sub-divided into about six areas which make the information needed easy to find.

The endless amount of topics, each contain animations, pictures or video clips which not only increases the audiences’ understanding of the topic but also keeps the audience entertained! Having a glance at the topics increased my curiosity of how things do work and I believe I could spend hours on the website to increase my general knowledge and have all my curiosities answered!

The audience are able to sign up for weekly news updates from the website keeping them up-to-date with all the great stuff going on in the world and it also contains brain teasers, not only for fun but also to challenge the audience. A new feature of the website is the section on readers’ opinions where the audience are open to discussion boards in which they can state their opinions and views of various topics.

The downside of this website is that the immediate presentation is not as attractive to the eye as say the BBC Science and Nature Website. The BBC website caught my eye straightaway and I was curious to have a look around, whereas, it was only after I had a look around the ‘how stuff works’ website that I found the positives of the site.

Younsuk Oh

Class 18: Health promotion and health metaphor

Today we looked at health communications. Probably one of the biggest areas of science communication (bar the weather forecast), this area nevertheless often gets forgotten by PUS promoters. This is maybe because these communications don't come from the usual suspects, but from the government, charities, and businesses.

Health communication comes in all sorts of formats, but we focussed on just one: leaflets. We had a whole bunch of these, advising us on everything from meningitis to migraines, and evaluated their audience, purpose, and effectiveness (good practice for the essay due in next week). Generally we quite liked the ones we had; although we noted that their purpose was ultimately to inform, educate, and change behaviour, which raised the memory of traditional PUS.

We then had a look at the metaphors the leaflets used. The ones that we found were often in images; other than the 'military' metaphor of disease the text seemed to use relatively few 'live' - i.e. obvious - metaphors. However, a final point at the end was that, according to Lakoff and Johnson, all of our language is actually suffused with metaphor - we just don't notice it any more.

One thing I didn't get chance to mention: health promotion as a recognisible genre. We talked at the start about we recognised health communication, and mentioned things like purpose and who the communication comes from. But are there other things in the style that make us think 'health promotion'? Take a look at this ad and think about what it's trying to mimic and why...