Conference Report
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2008Make your blog more interactive! but do it ethically..
Two great sessions at the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference offered up great insights on these two aspects of the blogger's craft. Janet Stemwedel ran the session on ethics and Dave Munger did the one on interactivity. That truly was an opportunity to learn from the experts. So just what did they have to say? You may want to read Janet's report, in which she calls for readers to help build the science blogging ethics wiki. Dave has posted "helpful stuff from my presentation..."
Their posts are very helpful but I thought I'd give…
thusspakezuska | January 22, 2008Coffee, good food, and the world's best popsicles - these were just a few of the perks associated with attending the 2008 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference! Not to mention mingling with 200 other bloggers, journalists, educators, and students. I've been so out of touch with the blogging world for so long recently; it was delightful to feel the energy and ideas sparking off each other. Plus, I got to meet Sciencewoman and Minnow!
Karen Ventii and I had planned to webcast our session on Gender and Race in Science Blogging, and we did, in a manner of speaking...unfortunately, it…
thusspakezuska | June 20, 2007I wasn't able to attend the WEPAN national conference this year, and I really missed going. So I was glad that Carol Muller of MentorNet wrote to the WEPAN listserv today with a mini-conference report/follow-up. She covered three topics: the plenary session tribute to Denice Denton; follow-up to a MentorNet panel discussion that mentioned NOGLSTP; and plans for MentorNet for the coming year. There's also a sneak preview for MentorNet at ASEE. Details after the jump.
Carol writes:
I am writing to provide requested and promised follow-up on 3 items which were part of our discussions at…
thusspakezuska | June 6, 2007N.B.: Nature Physics (3, 363; 2007) has an editorial on a recent American Physical Society workshop, Gender Equity: Strengthening the Physics Enterprise in Universities and National Laboratories. This post is based** on that editorial, which is behind a paywall; you can read part of it here.
So, the American Physical Society had a gender equity workshop, and all the bigwigs came - chairs of 50 major physics departments, 14 division directors of national labs, leaders from NSF and DOE. "After all, if there is to be change, it has to come from the top." Sounds good on paper. There was…
thusspakezuska | January 25, 2007Dr. Free-Ride has graciously put the slides from her talk at the Science Blogging Conference on the conference wiki, so I'm thinking I can go ahead and blog about the stuff I thought I couldn't blog about in my earlier post.
Specifically, Dr. Free-Ride spent some time talking about conversations that happen in the blogosphere that might not otherwise take place. She enumerated and categorized these. Her basic categories were as follows:
Educational Conversations
Political Conversations
Conversations About the Scientific Literature
The Virtual Scientific (or Lab) Meeting
Conversations…
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2007Hunt Willard spoke at the NC Science Blogging Conference about "Promoting Public Understanding of Science". Willard is the director of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. He made a distinction between getting people to actually understand the science itself - which he felt was really hard to do - versus getting them to understand the implications of science. He felt it was very easy to get people on the bandwagon with implications.
I'm not sure, however, that you can do an adequate job of getting people to understand the implications of this or that bit of science without…
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2007Just had to share this ridiculous photo of Bora taking a picture of Dr. Free-Ride taking a picture of Bora...
...and Bora looking so suave in his Darwin t-shirt! Or is it Professor Steve Steve who makes Bora look suave?
Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2007I think my favorite part of the day at the Science Blogging Conference was when Dr. Free-Ride gave her talk. It was titled "Adventures In Science Blogging: Conversations We Need To Have, and How Blogging Can Help Them". I am hoping she will turn this into a paper and publish it somewhere so I don't want to steal all her thunder. But I do want to share just a bit of what she talked about.
Dr. Free-Ride talked about the need for community and communication as key ingredients for human beings to flourish. She also drily noted that since, when she last checked, scientists are still human…
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2007At the Science Blogging Conference, I picked up a bookmark from the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center. The SMT Center's website is very, very cool. If you are a K-12 teacher, or if you run an outreach program, or if you are a scientist looking to collaborate with a K-12 teacher or someone who runs an outreach program, then you might want to visit this site. They have some nifty resources and lots of good links, including some links to funding sources. This site is especially helpful, of course, if you live in North Carolina, but even if you don't live in…
thusspakezuska | January 23, 2007At the Science Blogging Conference, Bora urged us to visit the conference wiki and "click on the logos of our donors to show them interest in their sites". Because it was Bora who asked me to do so, and because I want our donors to come back next year and support us in this endeavor again, I obediently went to the conference wiki and started clicking on donor logos.
And what a lot of fun I have been having! Who knows when I might have discovered the Endeavors site without the conference wiki donors page, with this nifity article on Cultivating New Scientists.
Eleven years ago, Tomeiko…
thusspakezuska | January 22, 2007Just a short note to let you all know I've added a few blogs to the blogroll.
I thank Dr. Free-Ride for introducing me to A Natural Scientist. Do read this post of hers.
I had such a great time at the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference talking with Lab Cat , who has a post on the Teaching Science session and on the Illustrating Your Blog session. Yay! Lab Cat lives near me! Thanks for toting me all over Chapel Hill in your rental car, Lab Cat! I also had such a nifty time with Eva who writes Easternblot. I believe Eva will be writing about the conference for Inkling, so…
thusspakezuska | December 13, 2006Today marks the debut of guest-blogger Cynthia Burack at TSZ. A professor at the Ohio State University, Cynthia is a political scientist who tools are feminist political theory and political psychology. We have worked together in the past on several projects, including work on group dynamics and resistance to diversity (see sidebar, NWSA Journal article) and on evaluating STEM department websites for diversity. What follows, however, is entirely Cynthia's work. I am grateful that she has allowed me to present it here. I think it is very important for all scientists to hear.
Zuska has…
thusspakezuska | December 10, 2006White papers from the WEPAN 2006 National Conference are now available on the web here. Papers available are:
But, Engineering IS Cool - Effective Messaging for Pre-college Students
Dump the Slump: Retaining Engineering Women into the 3rd Year
Facilitating Success for Women in STEM through Living-Learning Programs: Results from the National Study of Living-Learning Programs
The main conference website is here. You can access the conference proceedings. You should go check them out because I am absolutely sure you will want to read the two papers I am co-author on:
Designing Welcoming and…
thusspakezuska | December 7, 2006This entry should have been posted yesterday but I wasn't able to finish it in time because of migraine. I should have left the other easier stuff alone and concentrated on this earlier in the day when I was feeling somewhat better. In the spirit of better a day late than not at all, here it is, with all its migrainey deficiencies.
Some of you know, some of you don't, that December 6 is the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief item in its news blog:
White roses and candlelight vigils are part of ceremonies today on most Canadian campuses and…
thusspakezuska | November 17, 2006The second line of that quote, you know is "Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King".
At the Frontiers in Education conference held in San Diego at the end of October, there was an interesting work-in-progress titled "Evaluation of Canadian High School Girls' Perception of CSET Using A Play" by Anne-Marie Laroche and Jeanne d'Arc Gaudet. (CSET = computer science, science, engineering, technology) The authors developed a new play that
present[ed] different professions which are linked to CSET in a humorous manner, using everyday language and representations of several historically…
thusspakezuska | November 8, 2006I started this as a reply to a comment by Chris on my post Why Are All The White Men Sitting Together In The Other Conference Rooms? but it became a post of its own. Chris wrote:
As someone who's attended quite a few engineering conferences, I find that sessions about the profession/discipline tend not to be very well attended, and not representative of the meeting attendees as a whole. For instance, sessions on engineering education tend to attract only a small fraction of the attendees that come to sessions about using steel reinforced concrete in bridge design or retroreflectivity in…
thusspakezuska | October 31, 2006So I'm at a conference where the majority of attendees are white males. Well, after all, it is an engineering conference. Anyway, given the demographics, do you expect to walk into any particular parallel session and find that there are only two, three, maybe five white males, and the remaining 25 to 30 session attendees are comprised of ten or 12 white females and the rest minority women and men?
Where have all the white men gone? Long time passing.
The easiest way to clean all the white males out of your parallel session is to title it "Diversity" and to schedule talks on:
The…
thusspakezuska | October 30, 2006So I'm at the Frontiers in Education conference, and there's so much good stuff going on my brain is on overload. Plus, there are other people here who call themselves feminist engineers! It was worth the price of admission just to be in their company. And there are men who are giving papers talking about gender! White male engineers talking about race! Where has this conference been all my life?!?!?! Seriously, I can't believe I never went to this conference before. It totally rocks.
Also I met Bill Scher, blogger at Liberal Oasis, and author of Wait! Don't Move to Canada! A Stay…