I'm very excited to be teaching this class :) This post will always be pinned to the top of the page. Always be on the lookout for posts below which will contain important information about each class session!
Check out our most recent syllabus, attached to this page.
This week we spoke with Dr.
Hey guys! I'm interested in hearing some individual feedback about my 3MT. For anyone else who is also interested in giving/receiving comments, reply to this thread of the following (just a suggestion, feel free to do whatever you want) for each/or some of the presentations:
-A comment on the visuals
-Something the presenter did well
-Something the presenter could improve
If you do not wish to hear feedback, maybe also leave a comment or email the group that you would like to be left out. Sound good???
Happy summer, everyone! I hope you had a little fun with our last class. This week we borrowed a page (or several) from the Thing Explainer, Randall Monroe's book on explaining complex ideas using only the list of 1000 most commonly used English words. First, we crafted a short (~30 word) summary of what we do using ONLY those words. Then we worked to tighten them further to only 280 characters (or a single tweet), injecting in some more complex language while simultaneously preserving the simplicity of the statement.
This week, Dr. Colleen Hitchcock of Brandeis University joined us to talk all about citizen science and its need for (and role in creating) strong science communication. I hope you were convinced, as I was, that citizen science can be a fantastic mechanism for both hands-on outreach as well as publically engaged data generation.
Hopefully this week's Favorite Blog presentation wasn't too stressful for you all!
Hi everybody, I hope you enjoyed having Lian and Emma join our class this week as much as I did. Hopefully you found their feedback useful. For anyone who missed it, we took the pitches everyone wrote for homework last week and annotated them for jargon and assumptions. Each pitch was read by several different people so that you all could get a few different perspectives on your work thus far.
This week, we spent a lot of time introducing the concept of blogging. What does it mean to blog, what are some of the potential benefits and risks of blogging, and how can we handle negative feedback or, even scarier, deliberate trolls? This was a discussion heavy class - if you missed it, I encourage you to talk to your fellow students about our in-class conversation. Lecture slides are posted but will likely not be very useful without additional notes.
I hope you all enjoyed Skye's visit! I feel like I learned a lot from her talk, and I hope you did too. I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to workshop with her, but I think the tips & tricks she shared were useful anyways. I've asked her for her slides and will post them if she agrees to that. We spent most of the time talking about how to build an effective image or graphic, including how things like themes, color, balance, and weight play into your audiences' impression of the image. We also looked at some Adobe products and how to use them for building different types of images. Us
Hi all! I hope you found this week's guest interview useful. We had a fantastic chat with Dr. Diane Kelly, the self-professed "other penis lady" of UMass's faculty. Topics ranged from how to get paid as a science writer to the best way to communicate with a variety of audiences. Mostly, you all drove the interview by asking Dr.
