[Itech] Fwd: Tomorrow's Professor eNewsletter: 1380. Science Speak (Explaining Research without the Jargon)

Fri Jan 23 10:07:59 EST 2015

Hello Graduates,

This may be of interest to you!  (Especially those who are taking research
courses.)

Dr. Franklin

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Reis <reis at stanford.edu>
Date: Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 11:51 PM
Subject: Tomorrow's Professor eNewsletter: 1380. Science Speak (Explaining
Research without the Jargon)
To: tomorrows-professor at lists.stanford.edu

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*Contests that challenge young scientists to explain their research without
jargon are turning science communication into a competitive sport. *

1380. Science Speak (Explaining Research without the Jargon)

*Folks:*

[image: Rick Reis]

The posting below looks at a program that helps researchers explain their
work to non-specialists in a three-minute introduction. It is by Rina
Shaikh-Lesko and it appeared in the August 1, 2014 Careers issue of The
Scientist: Exploring Life, Inspiring Innovation [
http://www.the-scientist.com/][http://www.the-scientist.com/

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis at stanford.edu
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Tomorrow's Research
---------- 1,777 words ----------
Science Speak (Explaining Research without the Jargon)

In 2007, Alan Lawson, then dean of the graduate school at the University of
Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, was looking for a way to morph the
popular "elevator pitch" he had seen in the business world into a useful
academic exercise. The practice, which challenges young entrepreneurs to
explain their business plan to potential funders in less than 30 seconds,
could help graduate students improve their oral presentation skills, he
reasoned. But while a half-minute elevator ride may be all the time one
needs to pitch a company, Lawson didn't think it was enough time to
describe a research project. The perfect amount of time for science, it
turned out, had been staring him in the face every morning.

Queensland was in the middle of a drought at the time, and water agencies
had started to distribute waterproof egg timers for people to use in their
showers to help them reduce their daily wash to less than three minutes. As
Lawson dutifully used his egg timer to shorten his showers to the allotted
time, he realized that three minutes was a sweet spot "that would allow
people to seriously present a reasonably rigorous academic justification
for their work [to nonspecialists], while leaving time to convey the
excitement of doing it," he says. In September 2008, Lawson hosted the
first ever Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, drawing 160 graduate
students from various disciplines across the university.
By the time the second 3MT rolled around at Queensland the following year,
administrators at other Australian universities had become interested, and
in 2010, the first Trans-Tasman 3MT competition drew contestants from 33
institutions across Australia and New Zealand. Today, 3MT has mushroomed to
an annual event at hundreds of universities around the globe, and in recent
years, other oral research competitions have gained popularity, including
FameLab, which is now held in more than 20 countries.

Scientific communication is not a skill that's emphasized in most graduate
curricula, but more and more, university researchers and administrators
acknowledge its importance for both early-career and established
scientists. Pitting graduate students against each other to see who can
give the most engaging presentation teaches basic science-communication
skills that could help them land a job or establish collaborations with
researchers in other fields. Dejargoning descriptions of scientific work
becomes even more critical when communicating with a mass audience, notes
Darcy Gentleman of the American Chemistry Society (ACS) who is organizing
ACS's first ChemChamps competition - a science communication competition -
launched this year that is capitalizing on social media as a vehicle for
spreading science research. "When you take it to the public, that barrier
becomes even higher."

Being able to speak to people outside of academia is a valuable skill in a
changing funding landscape, says Kevin McCormack, public relations director
at the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and the
organizer of the state agency's 2012 Elevator Pitch Challenge. As federal
budgets are squeezed, researchers are turning to nontraditional sources of
money such as crowdfunding, where presentation can mean the difference
between a successful campaign and a shuttered research project. "All of a
sudden, you're taking [research] away from being the exclusive domain of
scientists and making it possible for many more people to understand,"
McCormack says. "You find they're suddenly really interested in your work."

The three-minute sell

The first 3MT competitions at the University of Queensland were hastily
organized, Lawson says. He decided to ban props to minimize flashy
showboating, choosing to allow participants the use of a single slide only.
Contestants faced off first at the departmental level, with winners
advancing to compete against successful presenters from other disciplines,
including engineering, sciences, and humanities. Both the judges and the
audience selected bioinformatics graduate student Michael Imelfort as the
top presenter that year, for his presentation on his research into
short-read DNA sequence data.

As more and more institutions have jumped on the 3MT bandwagon, Lawson has
been pleasantly surprised by the global popularity of the competitions.
"I'm astonished at what I thought was going to be a small event with 100 to
150 competitors," says Lawson. "Now there are 200 universities." Today, the
3MT competition includes two additional rounds, as university winners
progress to the regional heats to compete for a chance to represent
Australia or New Zealand at the Universitas 21 3MT competition, an
international online competition that began last year, drawing
representatives from 17 countries.

Entomologist Linda Mason, associate dean of Purdue University's graduate
school, heard about 3MT at a 2011 workshop at the Alan Alda Center for
Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York. She considers
being able to speak with nonacademics an indispensable skill, and she
thought it was a great idea. "We get a lot of [taxpayer] money to do
research," she says. "If we keep getting that money, they expect us to
communicate that research, exactly what we're doing and why we're doing it."

The following year she launched a noncompetitive version of the challenge,
before starting Purdue's official 3MT competitions in 2013. So far, she has
sat on a single judging panel that oversaw all 150-plus Purdue
participants, but next year, individual departments will be responsible for
judging their own students, she says. The winners of those early rounds
will move up through heats to university-wide competitions, mirroring the
structure at the University of Queensland.

In addition to offering students the opportunity to speak in front of an
audience, competitions provide them with feedback on how they
performed-something that students and researchers don't get during poster
or oral presentations at conferences. After each presenter, judges critique
their talk and give advice on what they can improve.

Moreover, some universities also offer prep courses to help the students
boost their chances. When Joelle Muenich, an administrator at Texas A&M
University's Office of Graduate and Professional Studies, learned of a
regional competition among Southeastern universities a year ago, she
scrambled to organize a campus-wide competition. Despite the rush, she felt
training sessions were an important component. She hosted a workshop for
about two dozen students, in which she outlined the competition and walked
the participants through exercises focused on the challenges of presenting
to a public audience. Mason hosts a similar workshop in the fall, a
semester ahead of the 3MT competition at Purdue. She uses improv techniques
from theater to help students feel more comfortable in front of an audience
and become aware of their own body language. A voice coach also speaks to
the class about how to project one's voice to a large audience.

Both participants and organizers say they can see improvement in the
students' communication skills. "Saying everybody's a winner sounds corny.
People come in at a certain level, but they leave improved," says Mary
Voytek, Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at NASA in Washington, DC, and
one of the founders of FameLab USA. Mason agrees. "[Competitors] can speak
about their research quickly and enthusiastically."

Beyond the ivory tower

In addition to training scientists how to communicate, presentation
competitions can bolster excitement about cutting-edge research, as well as
share how taxpayer monies are being used. "It's become more and more
stressed: anything that the government funds needs to be explained," says
NASA's Voytek. "We want an educated public as well."

It was Voytek who championed importing FameLab from the U.K. to the U.S.
The competition was launched in 2005 at the Cheltenham Science Festival in
southwest England. Like 3MT, FameLab quickly gained global popularity, and
since 2007, competitions have been held in more than 20 other countries.

After seeing a YouTube video of Cheung Ka Lun-the grand winner of the 2009
Hong Kong FameLab competition-describing his research on oxygen's role as a
life-giving molecule that also shortens lives by creating free radicals,
Voytek was convinced that FameLab could help her agency's astrobiology
program meet its outreach and education goals. In 2012, she and her
colleagues organized a pilot competition at NASA's national astrobiology
conference, open to graduate-student attendees. The next year, they got
even more ambitious, partnering with National Geographic to open the
contest to all science and technology fields. Of 85 entrants from more than
30 institutions, 11 finalists were invited to receive a half-day coaching
session and participate in a national competition, after which judges would
crown an overall winner who would represent the

U.S. at the international competition in Cheltenham.

Like 3MT competitions, FameLab uses a three-minute time limit and stresses
the delivery of an engaging talk. Unlike 3MT, however, FameLab allows the
use of props, but no slides. FameLab encourages the use of song and dance,
as well as other interesting delivery techniques. Daniella Scalice, one of
the organizers for FameLab USA, remembers a biologist who presented at the
first competition using a wooden bird, which she held as if it were a real
bird of the species she was studying for her PhD thesis. The bird was on
the verge of extinction and may already have disappeared from the wild.
Scalice vividly recalls how the presenter treated the decoy as if it were a
live animal. It was probably the closest she and the audience would ever
get to the real, rare bird.

Such techniques can be particularly helpful when communicating with the
public. Although these competitions rarely draw a nonscientific audience to
the live event, presentations from FameLab, 3MT, and other science
communication competitions are routinely posted online, where they attract
a much larger and more diverse viewership. This year, ACS's Gentleman will
be using YouTube not only to share the presentations with online audiences,
but to invite a broader group of scientists to participate. The first round
of ChemChamps was open to young scientists ranging from undergraduates to
pre-tenured faculty, and entry involved simply submitting a short video via
YouTube. Winners will be chosen based in part on their online popularity,
measured by the number of views each video receives, as well as on reviews
from a panel of judges. A dozen semifinalists will be flown to this month's
ACS conference in San Francisco, where they'll participate in an
afternoon-long training session on public presentation. Five finalists will
be selected from that group to give their talks at a public session at the
conference.

Early on, organizers of such science communication competitions say they
faced skepticism from faculty, many of whom were concerned that a contest
would denigrate serious research. But CIRM's McCormack refutes the idea
that making science easier to digest cheapens it in any way. "Just because
you're simplifying it doesn't mean you're dumbing it down," he says.
"You're just making it accessible. I don't think it trivializes it at all.
In fact, in many ways, I think it raises it."
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-- 

*"A teacher affects eternity; [she]he can never tell where the influence
stops." - Henry Adams*Dr. Teresa Franklin
Director, The OHIO Group
Professor, Instructional Technology
Fulbright Research Scholar to Turkey 2013-14
Department of Educational Studies
The Gladys W. and David H. Patton College of Education
Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701
740-541-8847 (cell)
also: franklinteresa at gmail.com

*~~~~~~Ohio University -- The best student-centered learning *experience in
America~~~~
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