Blogging against the stream • 1 Comment

Meg Barker • November 5, 2013

The potentials and pitfalls of social networking and blogging about research

Over the last few years I've developed a number of blogs to accompany my various academic/research projects and have become a big advocate of using social media in conjunction with research. Along with wordpress - which is a really easy way for non-technical folk to put up a website or blog - I've also used prezi to ensure that my presentations are publicly available, youtube for filmed clips, facebook and twitter for discussion and sharing relevant links, and storify to record online conversations such as livetweeting from conferences and other events.

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Biology Week – a celebration of the biosciences

Ellie Dommett • October 28, 2013

I was recently involved in the organisation of an event for local secondary school pupils for the Society for Biology’s ‘Biology Week’ initiative supported by The Physiological Society. The purpose of Biology Week is to celebrate all aspects of the biosciences. We set up a series of interactive displays and lectures and a dedicated online resource available through OpenLearn.

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How to lose publics and alienate people • 1 Comment

Emily Dawson • October 23, 2013

Social exclusion in public engagement with science

On Monday last week I gave a presentation as part of the ‘Engaging Research’ seminar series being run at the Open University (as you might have guessed since this is their blog!) The seminar series runs in conjunction with two RCUK-funded projects: 'An open research university'; and 'Engaging opportunities'.

My research interests are around who ‘counts’ as a public for so called ‘public’ engagement and how do engagement practices contribute to the exclusion of certain groups.

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Green, gold and exploding books

Ann Grand • October 22, 2013

Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, came to the OU today to talk about the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing. This was part of Open Access Week at the OU.

The green and gold swamp of confusion

The mire of confusion around the green and gold models of open access – and which is ‘best’ – is trampled by many feet. Too long to rehearse here, I’d suggest a quick definition is that in ‘’gold’, the author pays to publish their work in an open access journal, and it is then instantly openly available. This raises the question of who pays the charges, of course. ‘Green’ open access relies on authors themselves archiving, in publicly-available repositories (such as the Open University’s ORO) a pre-publication version of work that they have published elsewhere.

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Opening up opportunities for creativity through media training • 1 Comment

Denbigh Students • October 11, 2013

Denbigh School Students participating in the media training — Year 12 Denbigh School Students, from left to right: Tiffany Dudden, Alice Rose, Eleanor Papworth, Emma Holland, Georgie Rush, Heather Stone, Sasha Russell, Alex Dejean and Connor Bean

From the 1^st to 5^th July 2013 10 media students from Denbigh School participated in a Media Training Course at the Open University as part of the RCUK-funded Engaging opportunities project. The training was led by staff from the OU’s Open Media Unit.

Over the five days of this practical course the students developed and practised new skills, such as working with digital tools and technologies, producing pieces to camera, and editing footage. Six short films were produced over the course of the week. Here three of the students—Alice Rose, Connor Bean and Heather Stone—describe their experiences. Links to the completed films are embedding throughout the post.

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Focus Group-based Public Engagement

Eric Jensen • October 9, 2013

^* This post was originally contributed to the Isotope repository on 14th August 2008 by Eric Jensen at the University of Warwick and has been reposted here.

Activity description

Traditionally used by market researchers and social scientists to identify a range of interpretations on a topic of interest, focus groups have recently been adapted by at least two independent teams of public engagement practitioners with the aim of generating dialogue about robotics and health. This article describes the mechanics of planning, design and moderation of focus-group based public engagement events, making reference to these two cases, which were evaluated as part of the Isotope project.

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Engaging A-Level students with Postgraduate Researchers • 1 Comment

Anne Forbes • October 7, 2013

I finished my PhD in volcanology with the Open University earlier this year, and spent my summer working for the Brilliant Club. The Brilliant Club are a small but growing charity whose mission is to widen access to highly selective universities in schools serving low participation communities. They do this by placing postgraduate research students in schools to deliver small group university-style tutorials to pupils aged 10-18.

While most postgraduate research students teach one or two groups a week over the course of five weeks I taught five groups in four different schools in and around London. I took on this larger teaching load as I had already finished my PhD and was otherwise at a bit of a loose end.

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Engaging opportunities: a research café on ‘smart drugs’ • 2 Comments

Ellie Dommett • October 3, 2013

I recently took part in a Research Café at Denbigh School in Milton Keynes as part of the Engaging opportunities project. I’d been invited to take part as members of the project team were aware of my public engagement with research work.

The structure of the café was similar to the Café Scientifique events held across the country but instead of engaging members of the general public in scientific debate over a latté in the local coffee shop or bar, this event was held at the school with an audience of Year 12 students, sipping coffee and eating biscuits.

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Engaged Futures consultation and NCCPE blog

Richard Holliman • October 2, 2013

The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) is running an Engaged Futures consultation. Alongside, and partly in coordination with this consultation, the NCCPE have launched a blog (NCCPE's blog).

The NCCPE team invited various stakeholders to contribute a post to the new blog as part of the Engaged Futures consultation. Authors were asked to imagine a future for some aspect of engaged research.

My contribution was based on an imagined future for postgraduate research and it titled 'An engaging thesis'. The NCCPE team are keen to start a discussion around these articles, which will grow in number in the coming weeks, so feel free to comment, circulate, etc.

Why technology-enhanced learning needs engagement

Trevor Collins • September 17, 2013

Trevor Collins' seminar on technology-enhanced learning and engagement

Last Monday, I gave a talk on my research as part of the 'engaging research' seminar series associated with the RCUK funded Catalyst and SUPI projects. I explained why I think engagement is so important.

In my research, I try to identify the range of stakeholders in a given learning context that will be affected by the introduction of a technology. Through understanding the activities that the stakeholders are involved in, I try to develop technologies that will be used to facilitate learning without causing too much extra work for any individual stakeholder. By engaging, I hope to understand the stakeholders' perspectives and where possible collaborate with them to create something they will find useful.

Here's the video of the seminar along with the slides (including the cited references) and abstract...

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