Tag Archives: engaging research

Developing a publics-centred approach to conducting and evaluating engaged research • 1 Comment

Hilde Stephansen • June 23, 2014

Nick Mahony and Hilde Stephansen, The Open University

A case study of the Participation Now project

If you are reading this blog, you’ll no doubt be aware that public engagement is high on the agenda within higher education and many other domains. You’ll also probably be aware that researchers face increasing pressures – from their institutions, funders and colleagues – to engage publics and produce evidence of the ‘impact’ and ‘relevance’ of their research. However, little systematic attention has so far been paid to what precisely is meant by the ‘public’ in public engagement.

What happens if we put the ‘public’ at the centre of our efforts to conceptualise, conduct and evaluate publicly engaged research? This question formed the starting point for a presentation that we gave at the Open University on 9th June as part of the Engaging Research seminar series.

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Evaluating ways of capturing engagement processes

Gill Clough • June 16, 2014

Photograph of Gill Clough — Gill Clough, The Open University

Project Team: Gill Clough, Eliz Hartnett, Andrew Brasher, Canan Blake, Anne Adams

We are really excited to have been selected for seed funding from the Evidencing Engaged Research call. This project builds on and extends the work we are doing on the JuxtaLearn Project which aims to engage students with science and technology through creative video performance (see our earlier post).

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Managing ecosystems: research impact through engagement

Emma Rothero • April 23, 2014

An award-winning, externally-facing partnership with research at the core
I don't think of myself as an academic. Before I took on my current role as an Outreach Coordinator within the award-winning Floodplain Meadows research team at the Open University I'd worked for 12 years for the Environment Agency, delivering policy, legislation and proactive conservation projects ‘on the ground’ in Dorset, Wiltshire and a little bit of Hampshire. I'd worked with a wide range of conservation and community partners, occasionally getting cross with flood defence engineers. In short, I came to this job for a change!

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Technology and data driven collaboration – archaeological practice in the 21st Century

Anthony Beck • April 17, 2014

Seminar given on March 10th, 2014 by Anthony Beck, OrcID: Honorary fellow - University of Leeds, School of Computing

The text is CC0 (+BY). The illustrations are CC-BY.

Improving impact through Open Science

The Detection of Archaeological residues using Remote Sensing Techniques (DART) project has the overall aim of developing analytical methods for identifying heritage features and quantifying gradual changes and dynamics in sensor responses. To examine the complex problem of heritage detection DART has attracted a consortium consisting of 25 key heritage and industry organisations and academic consultants and researchers from the areas of computer vision, geophysics, remote sensing, knowledge engineering and soil science.
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Engaging research and the ‘Our Story App’

Natalia Kucirkova • April 4, 2014

I recently won one the the OU's first ever Engaging Research Awards. When I heard about the engaging research awards, I thought ‘hmn...How can there be an award for something which ought to be integral to any good piece of research? Isn’t engagement with publics the defining characteristic underlying all research endeavours? And how can one judge a piece of research to be more engaged than another?’

The more I thought about it, the more I realised how engagement with publics has been an underlying principle of the Our Story project. The story-making tablet/smartphone app (called “Our Story”) was developed in parallel with my PhD research and has led to a number of projects integral to my doctoral work but also expanding it to other areas, research institutions and publics.

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Evolving Science Communication: theory and practice • 1 Comment

Clare Wilkinson • April 1, 2014

Photograph of Dr Clare Wilkinson — Dr Clare Wilkinson

On Friday 4^th April 2014 I’ll be involved in hosting the second conference in our Evolving Science Communication series. You can find details of the first, held five years ago, in this report.

This conference celebrates 10 years of science communication programmes based at the Science Communication Unit (SCU), University of the West of England, Bristol. We’ve been delighted to work with our graduates to design a conference programme that we hope appeals to them, as well as to others currently working in and/or researching the ‘field’.
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A shared purpose for engaging research

Trevor Collins • March 7, 2014

Dr Richard Holliman, OU Champion for Public Engagement with Research

Leadership; Mission; Communication
Champion’s blog; star date 2014.03.10 (in effect, an update on the first post on this blog, 'An open research university').

Nearly two years of the mission completed; 14 months of funding left. "Where do we boldly go from here?"

I was interviewed late last year by Lucian Hudson, the OU's Director of Communications, to explore this question. We also discussed progress with the core mission of the OU's Public Engagement with Research Catalyst.

You can see the results of our discussion in the video below. If you'd prefer to read the text of the interview, select transcript.

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The Open University and the development of a researching public

Dan Weinbren • March 3, 2014

The Open University is over 40 years old. To celebrate this anniversary the university decided to document the rich social history of the OU.

As a social historian I was delighted to be given the opportunity to lead this project. Below I document some of the contributions Open University students have made to an open research agenda.

Constructing distributed publics of learners
Since it was opened to students in 1971 The Open University’s structures and pedagogies have shifted the notion of public research. A ‘public’, Michael Warner argued, is formed when texts (in the broadest sense) circulate among strangers and enable those people, through those texts, to organize together and to have experiences in common. ...continue reading →

Exoplanets and how to find them • 1 Comment

Andrew Norton • February 6, 2014

Professor Andrew Norton, The Open University

I’m an astrophysicist and my research is mainly concerned with what may be called the “time domain universe”, or simply: stars whose brightness varies with time.

Stars can have a variable brightness for one of several reasons: they might be intrinsically variable due to pulsations of the star’s atmosphere; they might be in orbit with another object that periodically passes in front of it; or they might suffer some form of catastrophic change that causes flaring or outburst behaviour, for instance.

One way to carry out research in time domain astrophysics is simply to monitor the brightness of all the stars in the sky and see what you find. This is, in effect, what is done by the WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) project, of which I and others at the Open University are part.

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‘Like asking a child to drive a bus …’ • 1 Comment

Beverley Gibbs • January 22, 2014

'Like asking a child to drive a bus ...': on seeing the publics of public engagement as citizens, not children

Last Monday (13.1.14), I joined the Open University’s ‘Engaging Research’ seminar series to share some research I’ve been doing on Scotland’s transition to a low-carbon society. Energy has always been a hugely important part of Scotland’s identity, and is set to continue to be a key part of the debates in advance of the Referendum for Scottish Independence in September 2014.

My particular interests lie in what the public engagement landscape has to say about, or how it contributes to, this ambitious transition. Fairly quickly, we can identify a disjunction between public policy priorities and the public engagement taking place from universities and the science communication infrastructure (by which I mean science centres, science festivals and informal science engagement practice). This gap is really interesting when you think about it, and in the discussion at the end of the talk we explored it a little further.

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