Dr Ann Grand, University of Western Australia
The Snakes and Ladders of Social Media World Tour…
In Australia as elsewhere, researchers are increasingly facing demands to open up and discuss their research in the public sphere. The issue of ‘research with impact’ is also live here – the new National Research and Innovation Agenda includes planning for a pilot impact assessment exercise in 2017.
Scroll down to the end of this post to download your copy of the snakes and ladders of social media.
Dr Ann Grand, The Open University
In May 2014, I began work with Helen Donelan and Clem Herman (Faculty of Mathematics, Communication & Technology) to create a workshop for the Open University’s 3rd Annual eSTEeM Conference.
Helen and I work in complementary areas: Helen in enhancing professional networking and engagement by exploring the activities of academics using social media; and me, as part of the Public Engagement with Research (PER) Catalyst, exploring researchers’ understanding of engaged research and how it is mediated through digital technologies.
Dr Trevor Collins, The Open University
Trevor Collins and I led a workshop session at the NCCPE‘s Engage 2014 conference this week.
The session builds on our work on digital tools for communication and engagement with the Open University’s Catalyst for Public Engagement with Research.
Dr Ann Grand, The Open University
This week the snakes-and-ladders-of social-media went on tour (if Milton Keynes to London can be counted as touring). I ran a social media workshop at London South Bank University as part of their Global Entrepreneurship Week. The session was aimed at researchers but included a small number of students and entrepreneurs, which enriched the discussion.
Dr Ann Grand, The Open University
Our seminar this month was a celebration of the diversity of engaging research at the Open University. To launch the second Engaging Research awards, we asked some of the winners of the inaugural awards to reflect on what ‘engaging research’ means for them in their research and practice.
Ann Grand
I’ve been involved with Cafe Scientifique for over ten years now and supported volunteer organisers to set up cafes all over the world. Closer to home, we’ve used the cafe scientifique model to develop a series of research cafes in schools in Milton Keynes as part of our Engaging Research project.
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Ann Grand
Ah, the irony. A workshop on how researchers use social media that was conducted entirely through the medium of a board game and cut-out paper snakes.
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Ann Grand, The Open University
Creating and sustaining an online research presence
As part of a small team of researchers working within the OU’s Public Engagement with Research Catalyst team, Trevor Collins and I have been exploring how researchers across the OU are using digital tools as part of their public engagement with research activities to develop an online presence that sustains public engagement with their research. Here’s an update on the work we’ve been doing…
Research staff surveys
The first step was to include four questions in the Vitae CROS and PIRLS research staff surveys in 2013. In one, we asked respondents to give us an example of a public engagement activity they had undertaken; only 3.5% (six people) identified some form of digital engagement (e.g. blogging, citizen science, podcasting, etc.). This suggests either that respondents are unaware of the potential of digital tools as an engagement technology or do not think of digital technologies as a means for engagement.
Research project interviews
Dr Ann Grand, The Open University
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.
Science in the Public Conference 2013 Poster
(with thanks to many prolific and interesting conference Tweeters)
This year was the seventh Science in Public conference and took place at the University of Nottingham, which is also the base for the Leverhulme Trust-funded Making Science Public project. There were over 120 participants from Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Portugal, the United States and the UK and more than 25 panel sessions on topics from responsible innovation to storytelling and public engagement to the dilemmas of making expertise public.
Sophia Collins
@sophiacol
Come to my #SIP13 session on storytelling. Stories! A ukulele! And a week-old baby!