good evening thank you for joining us for the teaching Nano and emerging
technologies Network webinar connecting classrooms and researchers with the
sustainable nano lock my name is Quinn Spadola and I handle education and
outreach for the National nanotechnology coordination office and before Miriam
begins I just want to talk a little bit about the network for teachers that
we've been establishing the network is for teachers who are using or want to
use Nano and other emerging technologies to inspire their students not only do
these technologies you know give you really cool examples to get the kids
excited like invisibility cloaks and gecko inspired climbing gloves but
teaching nano technology will prepare your students for the future it's
already impacting a lot of industry sectors like electronics and textiles
aerospace biotechnology medicine and clean energy if you want to learn more
about the teaching Nano and emerging technologies network please email
nanoed@nnco.nano.gov now on to this evenings webinar our speaker Dr. Miriam
Krause is from the University of Minnesota and is the director of
education and outreach for the Center for Sustainable nanotechnology
Miriam oversees professional development activities for CSN excuse me Miriam
oversees professional development activities for CSN trainees as well as
the center's public outreach projects she'll be discussing the sustainable
Nano blog and podcast sustainable-nano.com and how these outreach projects can
be useful for K through 12 educators go ahead Miriam wonderful thank you I want
to start by saying thank you very much to to Quinn for organizing this and
giving me the opportunity to to present to this evening and to the National
nanotechnology initiative and national no technology coordination office for
hosting the webinar thanks for capture gen for capturing all
the stuff that we're saying today and thank you very much to everyone who is
attending either live or if you're watching this in video on delay I
appreciate your taking the time I don't know if any of you who had planned to
attend this presentation originally back on June first we had scheduled to do it
and unfortunately I had to cancel but it was for a very good reason I was
expecting a baby and he came a couple weeks early and actually was born on
June 1st so that's why I wasn't able to do the webinar on that day and I say
this partly as an apology if anyone was trying to attend that day and wasn't
able to make it but also to warn you it's possible you may hear some
seven-month-old noises in the background as we do her talk so so please bear with
us if that happens so yeah as Lisa said my name is Miriam Kraus and the director
of education and outreach for the Center for Sustainable nanotechnology and as
part of my job I get to work on our outreach program for that Center and
that is largely comprises the sustainable Nano blog and podcast which
is a lot of what we'll be talking about I want to start a little bit by talking
about what the center itself is the Center for Sustainable nanotechnology
it's a it's a chemistry Research Center that's funded by the National Science
Foundation it's a multi-institutional partnership
so we have about a dozen institutions mostly universities and one national lab
and one agricultural research Experiment Station faculty across all of those
institutions about 15 or 16 and all of their students or well many of their
students so we have I think around 60 graduate students at this point involved
in the center there's a lot of people basically doing big cross institutional
collaborations on investigating fundamental molecular mechanisms by
which nanoparticles interact with biological systems so what that I'll get
to what that means a little more in a second when I talk about the multi
institution piece this is where we are CSN labs are stretched across the United
States so this is a little bit unusual for a research center most often you
even if you have multiple labs they tend to be on one
campus or at least in one city or maybe a kind of a hub-and-spoke model where
you have a lot of people at one place and then a few collaborators around the
country but the CSN is very very distributed and that produced a little
bit of a challenge as the center was getting started because of course the
National Science Foundation has places of some great importance on doing
outreach to the public because you know the public is funding the science and
and you know we need to be able to communicate to them what we're doing and
traditionally that is often done through in-person outreach events where maybe at
a Science Museum or at an on-campus event where the public can come and chat
with researchers and find out what they're doing but the Center for
Sustainable nanotechnology had to figure out a way to do something do outreach
that what didn't involve everyone being in the same place at the same time and
what they decided to do was to focus on online outreach and that started off as
a blog in in just the last about a year and a half
expanded into a podcast so we'll talk a lot more about that as we go along
tonight um going back to the research goal specifically for the center I
mentioned the what they call the nano bio interface so basically because it's
a chemistry Research Center they're really focused on using fundamental
chemistry so it's not this is in contrast it's not a medical research
we're not they don't do stuff with you know human health applications
necessarily it's not an engineering centre so they're not developing
necessarily new technologies directly but they're really interested in the
kind of molecular level interactions of what happens when nanoparticles interact
with biological systems so this is an example from an actual CSN paper where
they were looking at gold nanoparticles and what happened when they came in
contact with a cell wall of a bacterial species
and I am NOT a chemist so I can tell you a little bit about what happens here and
in fact that makes me I think is a benefit as I'm working on outreach
because I come at the communication from a lay person's perspective rather than
from the professional chemists respect but anyway this gives you an example of
the type of thing that the center does for research and therefore the kinds of
things that are part of the outreach goals for the center the sustainable
part comes in when we're looking at this question of what happens when biological
systems come into contact with nanoparticles we need to find out as you
probably know if you've come to any of these talks before nanotechnology is
pretty much everywhere in our in our society it's used in all kinds of you
know material science is used in in health and medicine
it's used for you know antibacterial properties in agriculture it's all over
the place but there's not necessarily a whole lot of understanding yet about
what happens when those nanoparticles get out into the environment so you know
if you have a say you have a shirt that's got silver nanoparticles in it to
make it antibacterial that's great but then when you wash that shirt 50 times
and those silver nanoparticles maybe get into the wastewater that comes out of
your house what happens when the they get into then into the waste stream or
what happens when thousands and millions of households have that kind of waste
product so this is the kind of thing that the Center wants to find out and
and what they're learning I can tell you you know spoiler at this point what they
know is that it depends different nanoparticles have different effects on
different types of bacteria different types of cell walls dip can depend on
the type of coating of the nanoparticle so the goal of the center and if we
continue to get our funding from NSF we have the potential to be a ten-year
center which is a very long term project the goal is to figure out if we can
learn some patterns about that and maybe even learn how to synthesize new types
of nanoparticles that are going to be as benign as possible and that leads us to
this kind of overview of the chemistry that they do it's a chemistry center
like I said but because of this focus on the environment in biological systems it
also overlaps with biology and environmental science
toxicology so they different parts of the center do
different aspects of this work and they of course collaborate with each other a
lot so there's some things about synthesis or how to how to make new
nanoparticles there's some stuff about investigating nano material exposure
which would be the example that I showed you in a previous slide
they're developing new instrumentation of like how do we even see these things
that we want to study there are computational chemists involved in the
center so they're using computers to model what happens to you know as the
different atoms interact with each other what do we predict that they're gonna do
nano material induced biological responses so what happens in that
bacterium for example if it is exposed to nanoparticles or they get inside
what what kind of what happens to its metabolism or what happens to its genome
that kind of thing and then as I said ultimately the goal is for a redesigned
to come up with safe things that we can predict will be safe rather than not
knowing when we go into it so all of that is kind of the backdrop on I should
say please feel free to ask questions as we go I'm very happy to be interrupted
otherwise I will just keep steam rolling along but um you can type into the chat
box or and I think someone can then I may even see it or someone can relay it
to me so so all of this is kind of late gives you the background of the science
that is the primary purpose of the Center for Sustainable nanotechnology
right the National Science Foundation funds this big collaborative research
center across all these universities the main thing they do is science anything
they do is research but it's also as I mentioned really important for the
National Science Foundation to do what they call broader impacts which you may
have heard of before that's kind of an umbrella term that covers you know what
are the other benefits besides just the scientific output of this Center and
that includes things like training new scientists so all these graduate
students that are part of the center we do professional development we try to
make sure that they are prepared to go out in the world after they graduate
and it includes public outreach and the goal of overall for the stand
public outreach we sum it up by saying the goal is to enhance the understanding
of an engagement with nanotechnology and sustainability by the general public so
both of these pieces are actually really important understanding obviously is
great like we want people to we want to be able to kind of increase the general
public's accuracy and what they know about nanotechnology to understand you
know nano nano scale is really really really small they have some concept of
how what that means or have a knowing facts about how nanotechnology is used
or understanding it's great if they can understand learn something about the
electromagnetic spectrum by by hearing our work about you know like electron
microscope microscopy or something like that just as an example but the
engagement part is actually also really important so even if someone comes away
from one of our outreach activities and doesn't hasn't quantitatively increased
their knowledge about nanotechnology but it they come away feeling like they are
more engaged some they liked what they heard there it makes them interested to
learn more if they come away feeling like they have a sense that you know
this Center is doing worthwhile science right kind of just getting that general
scientific literacy idea so the understanding and engagement go hand in
hand basically and as I mentioned before the main outreach kind of activity that
the Center has done from the very beginning is this blog called
sustainable now and it's at sustainable - nano comm as as Lisa mentioned earlier
and we call it our outreach hub because there's there's a whole lot of other
activities that we end up doing but we try to kind of tie them all back into
the blog one way or another and this is a here's a screenshot of one post this
can about the landing page looks like of the blog and we also have a we call our
sister site which is called nano sustainable a and it's
now assist me blade has Spanish translations of a whole bunch of our
blog posts and the idea there is to increase access to this content to
people who might not be as comfortable with English and my rat might prefer to
get their science content in Spanish and where we've done a couple different
approaches to this we've used some undergraduates kind of student
translators we've used a professional translation service we're still figuring
out what the best way it's interestingly I'm not a fluent Spanish speaker so it's
been interesting to me to discover it's kind of a specialized skill to be able
to obviously you know it's a specialized skill to be able to do science
communication in the first place and then to be able to translate from one
language to another and maintain that kind of accessibility
in tone right you don't want to be too technical you don't want to be too
informal so it's an interesting project if not to work on this necessity of life
but but that's something that we're hoping that that'll will increase access
to people who are primarily Spanish leaders I should say so there's a link
to that on the main blog site we also in most of our blog posts we try to include
links to educational resources for k-12 educators and so we'll have a little
section at the end that basically links to outside resources so this is these
are not things that we have developed in the center well actually in this example
here there is a we linked to a previous post so that is something from within
the center but mostly it'll be things like here's a lab summer program from
UCLA or here's something at scholastic.com that has a you know suggestions for
classroom activities that are related to the content of that blog post so this is
something that we we hope is of use to two k12 educators and when we get toward
the end of this we'll get to the part where I ask you what you think is useful
and and whether this is the kind of thing that
um you would actually use in your own classroom clicking on thing there we go
we also of course because we are a science blog we include primary
references so we try to be diligent about sourcing our information so that's
always there at the end of course we have test links to social media we're
pretty active on twitter our handle is just @sustainableNano all one word we
do a fair amount on Facebook I had gotten us onto Pinterest because someone
said that was a good idea and as the so does the outreach person it's kind of my
task to to staff these social media things and I haven't been super active
on Pinterest but that's something else I'm curious to hear about from educators
perspective that if interest is something that that you all use a lot it
could be worth us putting a little more effort into it
we have a link a box where you can click to submit some questions or some
comments on the blog and then of course we have a link to all of our podcast
episodes and I'll talk more about the podcast in a little bit so who writes
these blog posts we try to aim for an average of about one every week or so
you might be once every two weeks and it's largely written by our graduate
students which is I think fantastic it gives them a chance to practice their
science communications so it's really we
we designed this whole thing as equally almost a professional development
exercise for the students as it is an outreach activity so about half of the
posts are done by little less than happen are done by graduate students
staff is me and a couple of other people in the center faculty actually are quite
active as well and then we have a few undergrads some of our postdoctoral
trainees guests actually we enjoy having guest posts sometimes
REV is an interesting group that's our we have a research experience for veterans program
that we do in the summer and so we have three posts that were specifically
written by those participants about their experience
which is pretty cool and then we have an actually an embedded journalist program
that we've done a little bit with where we invite a student journalist to come
and kind of hang out in one of our labs and then write about that experience so
the the point of this post is that it's really it's a very distributed thing
across our Center as designed right this is something that everyone in the center
is supposed to be able to participate with even though we're spread out across
the country and and they really do the graduate students get a lot out of it
and they they cover a wide wide range of topics and the folks picture down here
are our peer editing team and one of the ways we make this a useful professional
development activity for our students is that they don't just write the write a
post and and kind of dump it on the website and then it's done we have a
pretty extensive editing process where they they write a draft and they work
with a peer editor to revise it several times and that peer editor works with
them on things like tone and finding a good hook and structuring the posts in
an accessible way cutting down on jargon doing all kinds of stuff to make it
actually a good blog post and I'll talk a little bit more about that process in
a little bit so I want to give you some examples of some of the posts that we
have done I've got a few just I grabbed a few of our most popular sort of
all-time most viewed blog posts and they tend to be things I guess not
surprisingly that are kind of googleable so you know we were to strategize on
sort of search engine findings this one is one of the most popular posts ever
over the course it was written in 2013 so over the course of the four and a
half years it's had I think about 45,000 views which is great but so if somebody
Google's how does a lithium-ion battery work this blog post can pop up for them
and so I think you know that's the kind of thing where again it's got pretty
wide appeal this one's similarly how do black lights work
why do highlighters look so bright so this was someone actually worked pretty
hard to make a headline or a title that actually would be kind of searchable and
this is just a fun this is our student actually who wrote it talking about how
you can make flowers glow under UV light and you might say to yourself what does
that have to do with nanotechnology and it's a little bit of a stretch but
there's actually a lot of interesting stuff to talk about regarding like
fluorescence and fluorescent properties of different nanoparticles and how we we
can use fluorescence to do different kind of measurements source of tagging
of different particles so we sometimes it's a stretch on some blog posts of
what exactly it has to do with nanotechnology or what exactly it has to
do with sustainability and that's okay I as sort of the blog editor I guess and
my perspective is whatever the student wants to write about and is
excited to write about and is passionate about and they're in their science or
their life as a scientist that's you know that's perfect topic for the for
the blog and often we will find some way you know even if it's a little bit
tortured to tie it back in with sustainability or nanotechnology somehow
another one that I suspect might be googled a lot by you know first year
chemistry undergrad students or just people who are curious is what's the
difference between diamonds and graphite right now this clearly has a
nanotechnology connection and that you can go very quickly from graphite to
graphene and talk about the difference between a 3d material and a 2d material
this one was written it by one of our faculty members Kathy Murphy who's at
the University of Illinois and again I think it's a nice example of something
that has pretty broad appeal and isn't it's not specifically about one of our
own research projects but so that said again these three are some of the most
highly viewed blog posts over kind of over time we also do though encourage
our students to write public friendly descriptions of their
own research and those posts you know maybe those will only be viewed a few
hundred times over the course of a year or something and I think that's fine we
because the blog has kind of a a couple different goals certainly we do want to
provide accessible public outreach and we want to you know be great to go viral
and and get tons of views and have people come and learn about the center
but because it also has this professional development goal where we
want our students to practice their communication skills and learn how to
talk about their science in an accessible way if not all of the posts
are super popular that's fine as long as it gives the students a chance to
kind of reach some public audience when talking about their science so I have a
couple other posts that I included here as examples that are a little bit
different this first one is from last year and this is by another one of our
faculty members Christy Haynes from University of Minnesota called what is
the Mathilde effect and how can we improve recognition of women scientists
and this is an example of a sort of category of blog posts where what I
think of like the like in science sort of category it doesn't have anything
really to do in nanotechnology other than that dr. Haynes is one of our
faculty members but it's really important issue in science in is kind of
you know how scientists function in society
so the Mathilde effect if you you may or may not have heard of it I actually had
not heard of it before dr. Hanes wrote this blog post but it's the idea the
Mathilde effect is when a woman scientist has a discovery or does some
bit of scientific work and a male colleague receives some most or all of
the recognition for it and she does not and this is something that obviously was
much worse in the past but there are some more recent examples of it and in
fact you know anecdotally there should this still absolutely happens this was
inspired partly by dr. Hanes International Women's Day was coming up
and she was reading some stuff about women scientists with her daughter and
she wanted to talk about the Matilda effect so this is actually one of our
more popular posts over the past year because it's I think really it's an
interesting topic it's something that people are interested in and it was it
has a personal resonance in the way the post was written and the last one I
threw up here as an example was something that that I thought was really
fun and it tied a question of chemistry very basic chemistry concept which is
mole's an atomic weight and pokemons go and this was one of our graduate
students Natalie Hudson-Smith who was just she plays Pokemon go and she was I
don't know how this popped in her head one day but she was wondering if she
could figure out how many moles of gas were in this particular type of of
Pokemon so and it came out right at Halloween so that was a that wasn't a
nice popular post as well so again not directly explicitly nanotechnology but
certainly this fun sort of fundamental chemistry concept addressed in a really
fun way so we encourage students obviously to do that kind of thing to
that's that's a little bit frivolous I think those those make some of the best
blog posts in my opinion so transitioning a little bit then we have
the the blog is our main effort we try to get all of the students to do at
least one blog post a year to get that again that writing practice they do tons
of writing work in very formal kind of academic or scientific writing mode but
that's a very different style they're obviously very different audiences to
the blog audience and so we try to give them that opportunity to kind of stretch
their writing muscles a little bit and think about how you how you address
different audiences differently in writing and I think that's good it's
good for them to think about in their scientific writing as well because you
know I think scientific writing could stand to be a little bit less what's the
word could stand to be a little bit more accessible in general
so anyway about a year and a half ago fall of 2016 we started a new outreach
effort which was the sustainable nano podcast and this is for anyone who isn't
as familiar with podcast it's basically an audio program very much like a radio
program but it's not it's on the internet so you can listen to it
streaming or you can download it and it has different episodes and so we have a
website where all these episodes are posted and we've done 22 so far and
we've had pretty good success I mean I don't you know however you measure
success we've had about 5500 downloads of our all of our episodes put
together which I'm thrilled about since we just got started and kind of figuring
out our way as we go I put this a screen shot from episode 4 up here because this
was done with tons of help from Lisa Friedersdorf and Quinn Spadola
from the NNI they helped us get interviews with students who were part
of the generation Nano contest and the first year that it was run and so we
were able to put together this podcast episode about nano superheroes and they
included interviews with Lisa and with the students who were finalists in the
contest that year so we were really pleased with that episode but this one
just as much as the blog ranges in topic wildly so it at this point it's kind of
it's kind of a small operation I do a lot of the I do all of the production
meaning like just helping people recording and I do the editing so it a
lot of it is just kind of what I'm interested in and doing some of the
students have gotten involved as well they've done some of the interviews so
for example last spring if you've heard of the book lab girl by Hope Jahren she
came to Minneapolis which is where I'm based to do a talk at Augsburg College
and a few of us went over to to hear her talk and one of our graduate students
again this by coincidence Natalie who wrote the Pokemon blog post was the one
who got to sit down and do an interview with her so we were able to have an
episode of the podcast that was an interview with Hope Jahren so that was
one of our more high-profile ones because obviously you know she has quite
a following as a New York Times bestselling author and that was fun for
us too to get that chance and so we've benefitted greatly from people being
willing to to sit down and chat with us so we've done a fair number of mostly
interview format because that's a little easier to to deal with and editing but
the podcast is something that I'm also curious to hear feedback from from
educators about you know whether you use podcasts in your classrooms or if there
are if your students are creating their own podcasts you know what's the kind of
state of podcasting in pedagogy I guess this is what I'm curious about
so as in addition to the blog in the podcasts are the main kind of content
that we generate but of course we have to be on social media as I mentioned
before Facebook and Twitter are main things we try to say semi-active and at
least posting when we have new content but also you know linking to other
things excuse me so that's something certainly if you are on Facebook or
Twitter I encourage you to connect with us we are just @sustainableNano all one
word you can see it here I should have put it in text as well but and actually
you can see we had recently tweeted this picture from the matilda effect post is
here because we recently tweeted the Spanish translation of that post had
come up when I when I took this screenshot so here we go
so I have alluded to this already a little bit this concept of outreach as
communication training so we're not only doing outreach for the purpose of
communicating with the public and making sure the public has access to our spa
science which is funded by by the public they should know what we're doing so
that is very important but at the same time we also want to make sure that
we're taking the most advantage of it as we can as a communication training
opportunity for the students in the center so for example
one of the main ways we do this is that at least once a year I will do how to
write for the blog a little one but webinar for our students and we talk
about things like just the goals of the program overall and then we talk about
the process that they go through just the how does the peer editing system
work but then we talk about sort of conceptual stuff when we explicitly talk
about the differences between what they've been trained to do in scientific
writing versus what they will need to do in blog writing so for example in
scientific writing you it's expected that in an introduction for example
you start with all the background and you talk about all the work that has
been done in the past and then you most likely will gradually lead up to the
very end of your introduction you say and therefore this is what we do in this
this is what we're gonna describe in this article in a blog it's actually
completely upside-down from that you're much more likely to start off with
here's what we're doing this is the exciting thing and then you back up and
maybe give a little bit of background about why or what's been done before and
of course it's much less in depth you're not going to go through an entire
exhaustive literature review in the introduction section of a blog right so
we talked about those those different the contrasts in styles so that they
they understand that it's really different skills that they're using when
they're doing these two different types of writing and we talked about jargon
and we talked about how that's you know the precision of language that's
required in a scientific article is actually can be counterproductive in a
in a blog post that kind of thing we talked about you know rules about image
use on the Internet so learning about public domain and Creative Commons
licensing and that kind of thing and then we talked a little bit about social
media and how to use social media and good stuff so this again sort of
professional development benefits for for doing this kind of outreach work and
as I mention before just the you know when we talk
about the process of that communication training they work with me the writers
work with me first I'm the education outreach director is
what that means to refine the topic the pitch often students when they first
send me a topic that they want to write about they say I want to write about
such and such for my blog post I can almost always write back to them and say
you have at least three blog posts worth of material in what you've described the
first post could be this the second post could be this and the third post could
be this because they've just and it's great you know they're excited
about the topic but they need to kind of unpack and focus and realize that when
you're talking about a something that's gonna be public friendly you can really
break it down a lot more than they do initially so once they've refined that
pitch then I assign them to one of the peer editors who again are down here and
the writer and the peer editor then go through two or three revisions and this
is a nice exercise for the peer editor as well because they're getting to see
to practice those editing skills and some mentoring skills and so they go
back and forth in its course it saves me time because I'm not doing the entire
editing process for all the blog posts and then when they have a semi final
draft they send it to me and then I do yet another round of it it's with them
before we actually get it posted on the website so this is perfect I've kind
of zipped through a lot of this stuff because I wanted to save plenty of time
for discussion and I have two kind of two slides here of questions for you so
thinking about how sustainable now can help K-12 educators or how it
can be useful and you know the first kind of obvious things that we've done
so far is that we have and you can sign up for an email alert whenever we have a
new blog post and as I mentioned earlier we do have those in most of the posts
not all we've tried to include at least a few educational resources at the end
so classroom activities or you know good videos that are related to the
topic of the blogpost that might be relevant for educators but but I'd like
to hear from our participants what you think additional things might make
the blog and podcast in their current form more beneficial so for example we
have not been putting those educational resources in the show notes of each
podcast so podcast episode so that's one obvious thing that I could imagine might
be useful if that's something that you would actually take advantage of
potentially as an educator looking at these resources but the second part is
to think about what new programs might make the blog and podcast more useful to
educators and this is these are things I'm thinking about a little bit bigger
point-by-point for example things like would you take advantage if there
was an opportunity for a Q&A with an author of a blog post you know would you
have the students read the post and then would have them come up with questions
for the graduate student who wrote it or should we be convening a group to figure
out what next generation science standards are relevant to each blog post
that seems a little daunting to me not as you know someone who's not familiar
with them or doesn't use them all the time it's at its I don't know how big of
a job that would be but if that's something that would make the posts
actually more user friendly for educators that's something that we want
to hear you know should we be writing little study guides to go with the
podcast episodes and if so what would be useful for that
what kind of interactive stuff could we do with your students are there things
where you know you have the students submit questions that could turn into
blog posts or podcast episodes with the students want to actually produce some
of these things themselves and maybe go through that editing process to learn
about how you pitch you know how do you craft a story for a blog post or how do
you interview someone for a podcast so these are all things that I've kind of
toyed with over time but I don't know you know this is
one of the reasons I was excited to take the chance to do this webinar is that I
was hoping that I could get some feedback from real live educators about
the kinds of things that you might find useful if you're trying to bring
concepts about nanotechnology and sustainability for chemistry in general
to your students so those are the things that I have and I'm you know want to
make sure I cover this slide which is to say thank you very much for attending
and for listening these is my contact information here our twitter handle this
is the blog and of course there's a link to the podcast there the podcast direct
URL is just sustainable-nano.com/podcast and this last URL is for our
Center website itself so you know I certainly encourage you to take a look
at that as well but to go back this is the point where I'd love to hear
questions obviously you don't have to answer this directly but any questions
about any of the stuff that I've talked about but I'd love to just kind of
launch into a discussion of what what you in the audience would find useful or
how how do you use blogs or podcasts in general in your in your classroom so
yeah open it up to anyone who has questions or comments Thank You Miriam
that was great oh we already have a question because I have some myself but
I'll just read it out loud so that when this is archived people can hear it but
this was somebody was just wondering about your how do you know how
successful your activities your outreach activities are how are you measuring it
just through hips on your your blog posts are you circling back with any
educators or have people are the comments how are you figuring that out
yeah that is a great question so we are still we're still working on that we
still figuring it out we certainly look at our analytics and count our hits and we
like to report to NSF like I said you know we know one of our a couple of our
most popular posts of all time have you know 44,000 hits and and overall I think
we're close to half a million hits on the blog you know and it's been around
for five years so we're certainly not not a superstar but people come to
the blog so that that makes us happy right but it's also the kind of thing
where I don't know what's the number that makes us successful if
we were getting five hits a day would that be good enough you know that's five
people who are looking at our blog every day
if we were getting 18 million that would be great too right so so that's one
thing um we've talked about wanting to do kind of a focus group so through the
blog kind of recruiting um some likes like super users you know people if we
can find people who actually read the blog faithfully to talk to them and say
what do you like about it what do you get out of it how do you use
it and be able to have that as our another metric how we how we're
successful doing something like this where we can get feedback from real
people who might it's great and then something we just did this past fall is
that we went to the Minnesota State Fair has a collaboration and a collaborative
program with the University of Minnesota where researchers can propose to do a
data collection at the state fair so we actually went to the state fair for a
couple half-day sessions and we had about 400 people fill out a survey well
we call to the survey it was an experiment there were two different
conditions one where they read a blog post and one where they read a Wikipedia
article and we had were able to measure whether they basically were trying to
measure engagement so we gave them an opportunity at the end of the study to
sign up for getting blog updates that was one of our measures of engagement is
do they want to know more we offered them a chance to read a second
article so that was another another measure of engagement we're actually
still in the middle of analyzing that data but we've got some evidence now
from these four hundred people who were just not necessarily sort of normal
science blog readers of whether reading a blog article a blog posts made them
kind of wanna want to know more and so there's
we're promising information from that so that we're pretty excited about
that but but the short answer is it's it's difficult and and it's a little bit
of a open question now I think even in the literature there's not a ton of
research out there about kind of blog engagement or to what extent science
blogs I think I think certainly people who enjoy reading them enjoy reading
them that's not a question but there's an extent to which you've got a science
curious audience is one way I've heard it referred to which is people that are
already interested in science and they or may not you know you may or may not
be reaching people outside that that audience with a blog and maybe that's
okay maybe there's other mechanisms for doing outreach with the
different populations but anyway that was a little bit of a rambling answer
but I think it's a really good question to ask about how we measure success
looks like there's another oh there is and actually I was wondering about this
too I think you covered it briefly but but maybe if you want to go back and
give more information but I'm guessing they're asking if their students
K-12 students could submit ideas for blog posts I was actually wondering
that too and I think you did mention you can subscribe was there also a place to
submit ideas yeah absolutely so I will say I would encourage you if you're
interested to have your students do something like that to email me directly
and I will put my contact information back up here cuz then I will or I guess
you could tweet at me too I'll definitely see that um email or Twitter
are the ways that I will see it for sure we do have that kind of ask a question
button on the blog and as you can imagine that attracts a fair amount of
spam so I don't always attend to it as promptly as I should so I encourage you
we would love to hear from from your students about what questions they would
have and it could be really about anything obviously if it's if it's
tangentially related to sustainability or nanotechnology that's ideal but but
we've had or anything and there's Linus
hi Linus alright great thank you um yeah I might submit some blog ideas
to you until we see other people post some questions I'm gonna take this
opportunity to ask a couple of things that I thought of while I was listening
to you Miriam you mentioned having a webinar on how to write a good blog post
for students is that something that's available online is that something other
people could take advantage of or is it just for the people that are involved in
the sustainable Nano blog that's a great question it never occurred to us
to do it more publicly it's really it's it tailored very specifically to our
grad students so you know I talked about that you know how to think about
your own research project and the type sort of categories of posts that we
tend to have on sustainable Nano but the idea of doing something that similar
to that but that would be more broadly applicable as a cool idea and certainly
if there was for example say if there was a classroom that wanted to do a
project where the students wrote blog posts I would be delighted to work with
them on on how to do that
that's a that's a nice offer oh I looks like we're gonna be getting another
question it's good um let's see Oh somebody else interested in learning
more about blog posts yeah I think I loved your point about thinking that
scientific writing needs to be and then you pause and I can't remember what you
were do you thought of but in my head I filled your sentence in with a little
more fun so yeah the word that came to my mind talking about scientific writing
yeah is that it tends to be stuffy stuffy or pretentious and of course it
doesn't have to be but the it's easy to fall into that when you're doing that
very formal is I guess the polite way to say it
scientific writing is the style it tends to be very formal and that serves its
purpose but it doesn't those skills don't work in here when you're trying to
write a blog post so yeah so you're interested in in doing some kind of a
blog and a training thing do please drop me an email be great to figure something
out oh yeah that sounds great I feel like
that would be useful for anyone in everybody who's interested in science
communication or in general I was wondering could you talk a little I know
I'm taking up time I'm waiting for other people to ask questions but I like the
idea that you're working with student journalists are these undergrads from
the school do they approach you is it something that you put out a call how do
you find these journalists and are they undergraduates they are undergraduates
we actually it's been a very small program so far partly because of
those questions you've asked we haven't done like a broad recruitment effort
it's been mostly folks who so we have one of our labs as I mentioned we have
these you know twelve different universities or institutions where we
have people one of them is Northwestern University in Chicago and northwestern
is associated with the Medill School of Journalism and so our faculty member
there knew somebody at the School of Journalism and basically said hey you
have any students who want to come in at my lab for a day and so it's been
very kind of word-of-mouth so far I'm one of the one of the many things on my
to-do list for the coming years to think about ways to expand that and you know
approach other potentially other schools of journalism or or specifically science
writing programs right where you know there's a program at MIT and there's one
at Santa Cruz I think UC Santa Cruz that has specifically a science journalism
program where that might be a great place to find student could be
undergraduate students or even potentially master's students at that
level who would want to spend a day or a week kind of shadowing some of our
Center for Sustainable nanotechnology scientists and again I think this is
totally a win-win situation because it's a chance for the journalists to talk to
real scientists and and get some in-depth education about their work and
get to know the scientists as people and it's a chance for our scientists to get
to talk to a real live journalist and it kind of learn about their process so
yeah that's a it's a program that has been been very small so far but we're
hoping to expand it before we get to it looks like some other questions have
been posted I are you aware of the AAAS mass media Fellows Program
which is to put I was gonna say I'm aware of it only from talking to a
couple of people including yourself who participate but I don't know a
whole lot of the details well it briefly because that's not what this is about
it's just putting basically science students not necessarily PhDs I think
bachelor's and even people currently going to school into news putting them
for the summer into newspapers or embedding them or CNN actually it takes
one but different different places to help them work on their science
journalism so I'm wondering if there would be an opportunity to point out
something with these big NSF funded centers embedding a journalist student
for that purpose I think that would be really valuable for all and
all right we've got a couple of questions one is actually wondering if
have you had a lot of interactions with high school teachers yet you've got a
lot of questions for them here but if you've had any feedback so far if you
know if is there any way to tell if you're audience I guess is students and
then also oh it looks like somebody's interested in learning more about
Pinterest I've heard teachers like Pinterest as well so I hope that is true
yeah so um the question about teachers we haven't had any direct feedback I
heard from an undergrad instructor that they used now I can't remember which
post it was actually it's just let my mind but they they let me know that they
used one of our posts in their class so that was quite gratifying and then we've
we know some demographics like from our Facebook user profiles and stuff but we
don't and we've tried to do a couple of like reader surveys but we've gotten
very low response you know which is which is to be expected anytime you do a
survey if you can get even sort of 10% of the people involved to reply you're
lucky so we haven't done don't know basically is the short answer we don't
know how many high school teachers if any are using the posts and that's part
of why like I said what I'm hoping might come out of this is even to get some
contacts from people of how I could reach out better to so teachers and
make sure they they just know that the blog exists as a resource and then to
get feedback from them about how to make it a more useful one and then the
question about Pinterest yeah so this is actually somebody told me like the
teachers like to use Pinterest and so I was like okay I'm gonna be on Pinterest
but it's not something that I had used before myself so I was a little bit
stumbling around and kind of trying to figure out what we've mostly posted on
there was links to our own blog posts which i think is not necessarily the
most it's not going to attract users it's not going to be something that
people would necessarily find in searches on be very grateful to hear
such questions of how like how to make
Pinterest useful for us and for like you know how is Pinterest interactive in
that you know obviously you post stuff on your page and other people click on
it but I'd be curious to hear how teachers in a practical sense like how
you use Pinterest I think I'm going to thank Miriam so much for taking the time
to do this and I will follow up with you of course Miriam afterwards and thank
you to everyone who logged in now and for the people who watch this on YouTube
later and I hope everyone has a good night thank you so much it was a
pleasure and yeah I look forward to hearing from people of both online now
and and people who watch this in your archive later
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