At our Science Communication sessions in January  a number of you  commented that 6 minutes wasn’t long enough to get a science message across  to a public audience.
Here’s a link to a series of 6 min TED science talks that might help convince you otherwise.

Don’t forget also there are a number of posts in our blog archive that will help you prepare your talks,

e.g. March 7th 2017 : Engaging Hearts and Minds: Themes are Messages

April 21st 2017:   Welcome Everybody…Some Musings on Introductions

May 12th 2017:   Tell me what I want to hear,    to name just a few.

Simply go to the archives tab on the left and select the specific month.

For those of you working on films and science blog writing see what good examples  you can find in these science communication styles and we’ll  put them up on a future post with any that we  come across.

Don’t forget to check to  keep posting on Knowledge Forum!

Many names over the centuries have become synonymous with scientific achievement and discovery, etched in our collective understanding for the ages. Like famous explorers – famous scientists leave their names in the footprints of history with phenomena, units, models and formulae named after them. The most famous scientists tend to be those who not only make great discoveries that advance mankind, but also manage to communicate their work and the importance of their work to the world outside their lab. They are also great science communicators.

Yesterday, Stephen Hawking passed away. Arguably one of the most well known physicists of our time. Hawking radiation, just one of his many theoretical accomplishments carries his name. Hawking wasn’t just a theorist though, he made the transition from academic to popular culture with his books aimed at children and adults as well as appearances in popular media such as the Simpsons, Star Trek and the Big Bang Theory. Stephen Hawking was a passionate Science Communicator in whose honour the prestigious Stephen Hawking medal for Science Communication was named. This is awarded annually at Starmus festival to recognise excellence in Science Communication at an international level.

The story of Starmus festival in itself is a great story of Science Communication. In 2007 Brian May, founding guitarist of the rock band Queen, completed his PhD dissertation on zodiacal dust in the solar system. Along with one of his co-supervisors who also happened to be a musician, they founded the festival as a way to “celebrate science and the arts with the goal of bringing an understanding and appreciation of science to the public at large.”

In a world where we are exposed to and consuming more information than ever before, it is vital that Scientists are able to convey their work to the public in a way that the public will understand. Scientists like Stephen Hawking attempted to bridge the gap between academia and the public through writing, speaking and films aimed at explaining their very complicated research to a public audience. This trend of scientist as communicator carries on with many leading scientists today writing, filming and speaking about their work to the public. (Including our very own budding scientists, the OUASSA students, who are presenting their work to the public on the 13^th of July at the Otago Museum). After all, as our own Ernest Rutherford is quoted as saying “It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid”.

Bloom’s Taxonomy – good critical thinkers travel up towards the pointy end.

The New Zealand Curriculum defines critical thinking as “examining, questioning, evaluating, and challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about issues and practices” and critical action as “action based on critical thinking”

As scientists, we need to be thinking and acting critically in order to ensure that the most evidence based and experimentally supported theories and ideas are being moved forward. Much has been written about how to teach, particularly science students to think critically (You can start travelling down that rabbit hole here)

Unfortunately, especially in high school, many students are driven by credits, exams and assessment and so knowing the “right answer” sometimes feels more important to students than critically thinking about the presented information to form their own answer. Another issue is that thinking is very hard to assess – because it goes on in the students’ minds, it is often difficult to see how they arrived at an answer and instead just assess the answer itself.

Critical thinking is an important skill to learn though, in this increasingly data driven world, we are evaluating information almost constantly. Learning how to separate the “wheat from the chaff” will help us make more informed and evidence based decisions, as well as stopping us from falling for “Fake News” 🙂

The scaffolds in Knowledge Forum are designed to help with this. By making your thinking explicit, you are not only showing that you are examining evidence and thinking critically, you are also able to think about your own way of thinking and evaluate the way that you are approaching information.

It has been agreed that the most effective way to improve your critical thinking is to practise. In Knowledge Forum, the scaffolds are an easy way to help you do this. In school, think about applying those same questions to your schoolwork. Every lesson is a new theory, now you need to find the evidence to support new theory and build your knowledge of the topic. Building your critical thinking skills will help your understanding of the topic and enable you to access those excellence and beyond grades.