GrrlScientist is an evolutionary biologist, ornithologist, aviculturist, birder and freelance science and nature writer. A native of the Pacific Northwest, she relocated from Seattle to NYC with her parrots after earning a BS in Microbiology (emphasis in Virology) and PhD in Zoology (Ornithology) from the University of Washington. In NYC, she was the Chapman Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History for two years, pursuing part of her "dream" research project by reconstructing a molecular phylogeny of the parrots of the South Pacific islands. GrrlScientist has written a blog about science since 4 August 2004 (the early years are archived 
St Paul's Cathedral London, December 20, 2004.
Image: Peter Morgan from Beijing, China (Wikipedia).
I am a panelist at a one day conference being held in London, England. This conference focuses on the value of blogs to the public, to science and to scientists, and is being held at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 30 August 2008. My fellow panelists are Jennifer Rohn, editor at LabLit.com and Anna Kushnir, who works for Nature Network Boston and writes the blog, Lab Life. The panel moderator is my friend and ScienceBlogs colleague who lives in London, Mo.
I need your help as I work on my contribution to this meeting, so I am asking you a series of questions I'd like you to respond to. The next set of questions are; Do science blogs educate the general public? How? What works and what doesn't? (Please provide examples).
Education & Careers
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Do science blogs educate the general public? How?
hmmm. I find many science blogs to be very educational. I'm not sure if I'm one of the "general public" or not, but most people I know personally do not read science blogs. My sense is that the people who most need to be educated about science are the least likely to read science in any form, especially science blogs. For people who already have a strong interest in science but are not practicing scientists, science blogs can provide a way to understand what is going on in a specific field.
What works and what doesn't? (Please provide examples).
I'm a social scientist who likes to read natural science (geology, wildlife biology, ecology, climatology and physics) written for intelligent lay persons. I teach statistics and research methods, and have mathematical background through calculus, so I can follow more or less many scientific articles, but really like it when someone translate it into more general prose -- like you did in when describing the experiement on evolution using the e. coli bacteria.
RealClimate would be an example of a science blog that works some of the time and doesn't work some of the time, for the intelligent layperson. Two posts are a good example of things that worked: Ice Shelf Instability and Moulins, Calving Fronts and Greenland Outlet Glacier Acceleration, both of which I thought laid out the scientific issues well enough for even the non-climate scientist to grasp them, yet with enough detail and references to allow a genuine scientific discussion to follow.
Posted by: Sue | August 21, 2008 4:37 PM