Communicating Research and Ideas Using New Media

What tools do you use to communicate your research? How do you engage with the public to inform scientific discourse? Does new media offer new opportunities to reach new audiences? Inform public debate over scientific progress/risk? To democratize science? To perpetuate inequalities? Colin offers hands-on workshops on new media skills (you-tube, film-making, blogging, website building, twitter, etc.) and is open to facilitating discussions in classrooms about new media, science and democracy. Contact c_anderson@umanitoba.ca

Social or “New” Media

Social media or “new media” is revolutionizing the way by which knowledge – both ‘scientific’ and ‘lay’ – is communicated. Indeed, social media represents a powerful set of constantly evolving tools for engaging society in scientific discourse. These tools have two main strengths that are relevant to scientific communication. A number of case studies of New Media and Science were described and discussed in a poster presented at the 2010 PrioNet conference in Ottawa Ontario. Click here to download it.

1. Accessibility: Growing Knowledge Networks

Social media is highly accessible to and intuitive for a wide diversity of audiences. Researchers can engage in ‘posting’, ‘tagging’, ‘linking’, ‘feeding’, ‘pinging’, ‘following’ and ‘tweeting’ to spawn new knowledge networks and consequently to amplify the reach and relevance of their research.

2. Interactivity: Opening Space For Science Dialogue

Social media tools are generally characterized by ‘interactivity’, allowing researchers to shift from the unidirectional “one to many” communication approach towards a “many to many” interactive approach.  This dialogue can be facilitated through ‘commenting’, ‘forums’ and ‘linking’ to engender interactive and iterative communication that further shapes ideas/outcomes and empowers audiences.

A summary of five new media tools and their applicability to communicating research/science.