communication
jstemwedel | February 8, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
This was sort of an odd session for me -- not so much because of the topics taken up by session leaders Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette, but because of my own sense of ambivalence about a lot of "entertainment" these days.
The session itself had lots of interesting glimpses of the work scientists are doing to help support filmmakers (and television producers, and game designers, and producers of other kinds of entertainment) who want to…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein).
Lindsey's article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
The panelists made a point of stepping away from the scientists vs. bloggers frame (as well as the question of whether bloggers are or are not properly considered journalists). They said some interesting things about what defines a journalist -- perhaps a set of distinctive values (like a commitment to truth and accuracy, possibly also to the importance of telling an engaging story). This, rather than having a particular paying gig as a…
jstemwedel | February 1, 2010I have, of late, received a number of emails asking advice on matters somewhere in the territory between ethics, etiquette, and effective communication with members of the tribe of science. While I'm no Ann Landers (as has been noted before), I'll do my best to answer these questions on the blog when I can, largely so my very insightful commentariat can chime in and make the resulting advice better than what I could generate on my own.
Today we have a question from a reader struggling with the question of how to address one letter to two doctors. He writes:
Hi Dr Free-Ride,
I'm not sure if…
jstemwedel | January 21, 2010In a comment on a post at Henry Gee's blog (I'd link the comment itself, but for the life of me I cannot figure out where the permalink is), Ed Yong offers his view on the relation between politeness and civility. Quoth Ed:
My objection comes when people mistake politeness for virtue rather than what it actually is - artifice masquerading as virtue. Politeness is what you teach children to tell them when and how to speak and behave before they are fully rational and capable of thinking through the moral consequences of their words and actions.
Adults, being (technically) able to do this…
jstemwedel | January 20, 2010There was one session at ScienceOnline2010 which I did not Tweet as it was going on -- the session I led with Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr. Isis. Here's how that session was described in the conference program:
Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents - Janet Stemwedel, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr.Isis
Description: Janet, Sheril, and Isis regularly write about the role of civility in dialog with the public and other scientists. In this session, we will discuss the definition of civility, its importance in the communication of science, and how the call to civility can be used to derail…
jstemwedel | January 19, 2010Session description: Much of the science that goes out to the general public through books, newspapers, blogs and many other sources is not professionally fact checked. As a result, much of the public's understanding of science is based on factual errors. This discussion will focus on what scientists and journalists can do to fix that problem, and the importance of playing a pro-active role in the process.
The session was led by Rebecca Skloot (@RebeccaSkloot), Sheril Kirshenbaum (@Sheril_), and David Dobbs (@David_Dobbs).
Here's the session's wiki page.
Getting the Science Right: Importance…
jstemwedel | January 19, 2010Session description: The conference timing may keep some attendees away in their hometowns participating in local MLK activities. Therefore, we are introducing a session to promote the principles of Dr King in the context of online science communication: promoting social justice and eliminating racism in areas ranging from healthcare to scientific career paths. We plan to take a different angle from the blogging about gender/race session: how do we cultivate emerging science writers from underrepresented groups to promote science, for example, in areas of health disparities (i.e., diabetes,…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Session description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your own in the future. Useful for anyone hoping to someday write for print or online publications.
The session was led by…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Session description: We will be talking about how the history of science and the history of the open-access movement have intersected. Steven Johnson touches on this theme in his latest book, The Invention of Air, in that 18th century British polymath Joseph Priestley was a strong advocate of publishing scientific data widely in order to create a greater dialogue between scientists. While Johnson only mentions this briefly in the case of Priestley, this theme runs strongly through the history of science and is what makes the debate over the patenting of genes or the availability of open-…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Session description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content,…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Session description: Debris in the North Pacific Gyre received unprecedented attention in 2009 with voyages from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Project Kaisei, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each voyage integrated online outreach into its mission, but emphasized very different aspects of the problem. What are the challenges of creating a major outreach effort from one of the most isolated places on earth? How can scientists, journalists, and educators balance "exciting findings live from the field!" with "highly preliminary unpublished non-peer-reviewed data that our…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Session description: Our panel of journalist-blogger hybrids - Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, Ed Yimmer Yong, and David Dobbs- will discuss and debate the future of science journalism in the online world. Are blogs and mainstream media the bitter rivals that stereotypes would have us believe, or do the two sides have common threads and complementary strengths? How will the tools of the Internet change the art of reporting? How will the ongoing changes strengthen writing about science? How might these changes compromise or threaten writing about science? In a world where it's possible for anyone to…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Last night I arrived home safely from ScienceOnline2010. As expected, the conference was tremendously engaging and useful, as well as being a rollicking good time -- so much so that the only blog post I managed to post while there was the Friday Sprog Blog. (Major props to the elder Free-Ride offspring for taking notes from our conversation and letting me bring them with me.)
However, as some others have noted (for example, drdrA), I did manage to maintain an online presence by "Tweeting" my real-time notes from the conference sessions I attended. And, as a step toward blogging something…
jstemwedel | January 11, 2010Today, on account of the fact that I'm pinned down doing course updating activities, I present you with a poll. In answering the question, go ahead and use whatever is your preferred definition of "civility".
For which topic do you expect online civility to collapse the fastest?(survey)
Of course, use the comments to discuss to your heart's content (including where I went wrong in constructing the poll options).
jstemwedel | January 7, 2010Sometimes I think the whole question of civility and incivility (online or offline) boils down to the question of am I welcome in this space?
Do you think I belong here just as much as you do?
Do you think I don't really belong here? Are you going to exert the effort to run me off, or are you just going to wait until I give up and go away on my own?
Do you welcome me enough that you'll tell me when I've messed up -- not because you were waiting for me to slip up, but because you respect me enough that you think I'd want to know that I'd messed up so I could fix it?
Do you trust me enough to…
jstemwedel | January 6, 2010Coming up with a good definition is hard. And it's not obvious that people are even really talking about the same thing when they identify an action or a situation as displaying civility or incivility.
So I'm wondering what kind of insight we can get by looking at some particular situations and deciding which side of the line it feels like they belong on.
Before I put the situations on the table, let me be transparent about how I'm making my calls: I'm going to be asking myself whether it feels like the people involved are showing each other respect, and I'm going to make a special effort to…
jstemwedel | January 5, 2010In preparation for our session at ScienceOnline2010, Dr. Isis asks:
I talked to my two lovely, delightful, and beloved comoderators last night, I couldn't help but think that we were approaching this from different experiences and, potentially, with different goals. That made it hard for me to figure out what having me there might add to our discussion, other than to cross the line in some way. I realized that some of my discomfort might come from the fact that I'm not sure that we are all defining "civil" in the same way. ...
[T]o get the discussion going here and help me in crafting my…
jstemwedel | January 4, 2010In the comments on my last post, a number of people made the suggestion that something about the nature of online interactions may encourage people to say things they would never say to someone's face, or to be more impulsive in their responses, or surf on waves of free-floating anger, or what have you.
While this may sometimes be the case -- for some people, in some circumstances -- my initial reaction is that there are a lot of features of online conversations (on blogs or the comment threads following them, in online fora, etc.) that I find can make for better conversations than many that…
jstemwedel | January 3, 2010Two weeks from today, at ScienceOnline '10, Dr. Isis, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and I will be leading a session called "Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents". In preparation for this, the three of us had a Skype conference last night, during which it became clear to us that there are many, many interesting issues that we could take on in this session (and that we come to the subject of online civility from three quite different perspectives).
To try to get a feel for what issues other people (besides the three of us) might want to discuss in this session (or on blogs, of whatever),…