Labcasts: Bringing cutting edge science to the classroom

Posted on Tuesday, 1 March 2016 by Vic Pearson

Dr Vic Pearson, The Open University

Dr Vic Pearson led the organisation of a ‘Labcast’, connecting Open University researchers with teachers and students from Denbigh School in Milton Keynes. Vic worked on this project with Dr Simon Sheridan, Dr Trevor Collins, Dr Gareth Davies and Professor Richard Holliman from the Open University; and Jenny Hallam, Helen Brown and Mark Russell from Denbigh School in Milton Keynes.

What is a Labcast?
A ‘Labcast’ is an interactive, live web broadcast that integrates video streaming and instant messaging to enable a conversation between two or more locations.

A short video explaining the concept of a Labcast can be viewed in the short video below.

Access to ‘cutting edge’ research
Initially developed for Open University (OU) undergraduate teaching, the Labcast model offers a number of advantages:

1. Provides access to a working laboratory and researcher.

2. Provides more opportunities for curriculum links than a ‘lab tour’ format;

3. Does not require students to be taken off timetable or transport costs to be found.

4. Has fewer implications for laboratories that are heavily used.

5. Contextualises researchers and their science in an authentic working environment.

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Engaging schools with research opportunities

Posted on Monday, 1 February 2016 by Helen Brown

Helen Brown, Director of Denbigh Teaching School, Milton Keynes

Through my role in leading Denbigh Teaching School Alliance, I’ve been overseeing the school end of the Engaging Opportunities Project. Through the teaching school, we’ve tried to engage as many schools and students as possible from across Milton Keynes in activities working alongside Open University researchers.

We want to increase knowledge and understanding of a range of research, but also of the researcher’s working experience. We want to create opportunities for young people to be inspired by research so that one day in the future, they may look back and think, “I took part in Activity X or Y with a real researcher and that made me want to….” In education, impact is often measured by results and short-term gains, but for us, the aim of this project is to plant seeds in young peoples’ minds.

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Engaging with neuropharmacology research

Posted on Monday, 4 January 2016 by Ellie Dommett

Dr Ellie Dommett

The Science Matters talk towards the end of last year (2015) was important for me to do for two reasons. Firstly, it was the first ‘TED-style’ talk I’d be asked to. I spend a lot of time giving talks to schools but these are often much longer so I have more time and slides to explain tricky concepts.

This was just a handful of slides to explain neuropharmacology. I had been on a course earlier in the year on presentation skills and have been trying to put this in to practice all year in my undergraduate lectures but this felt like a good opportunity to test out the same skills to a new audience (not in the unpopular 9am lecture slot).

Dr Ellie Dommett, Kings College London and the Open University. Photo: Dr Kate Bradshaw.

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Towards a scholarship of engagement

Posted on Wednesday, 11 November 2015 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Ideas about a scholarship of engagement are increasingly generating interest among academics, across the higher education sector, and within stakeholder groups and user communities. New challenges and opportunities are being addressed as academics work with peers, and sometimes also with user communities, to envisage, theorise and instantiate new places, spaces and methods for public engagement.

In so doing, scholars are connecting with the engagement agenda as they work to identify, and increasingly to assess, more effective ways of generating, representing, circulating and debating knowledge in the public sphere.

In exploring this changing culture colleagues and I at the Open University organised an Engaging Research seminar series (for further details, see below). You can view the archived recordings of the 12 seminars in this series at the following location: http://weblab.open.ac.uk/catalyst/per-seminars

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Science communication for development

Posted on Wednesday, 21 October 2015 by Clare Kemp

Clare Kemp, The Open University.

I joined the Open University in October 2015 as a postgraduate researcher. Based in The Institute of Educational Technology my doctoral research is supervised by Richard Holliman, Eileen Scanlon and Patricia Murphy. My aim is to specialize in science communications for development.

To this end, I have been a science communications consultant across Africa and Asia, North America and the UK for many years, developing knowledge, skills and expertise that I’m planning to integrate into my postgraduate research.

Clare Kemp (far left), with a film crew, working with a scientist, extension workers and farmers.

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Children’s Science Television: Then And Now

Posted on Monday, 5 October 2015 by Sai Pathmanathan

Sai Pathmanathan. Photo: Huw James.

We all watched children’s television growing up, and many of us still do (for ‘research’ purposes!). Some of us watched children’s science and technology programmes, and can attribute particular shows or presenters as the reason for why we pursued a science (or STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics) career.

But these days, how effective is children’s science television? Back in the early ‘80s, children would come home from school, put down their lunchbox and sit in front of the television to watch one of four channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV or Channel 4) as part of children’s tea time programming. Now, audiences are much more fragmented – there are hundreds of television channels, everyone’s viewing via different devices and ‘on demand’ services. So, is television still the best method to get science to young audiences?

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Monsoon evolution

Posted on Tuesday, 22 September 2015 by Jenika Patel

Jenika Patel

This summer I took part in the Nuffield Research Bursary scheme at the Open University where I participated in a four week project researching the Indian monsoon. My main aim was to see how terrestrial proxies (pollen and charcoal) could be used to understand the evolution of the monsoon from 3.5 million years ago.

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Back to the future II: Mad for mud!

Posted on Thursday, 26 February 2015 by Encarni Motoya

Dr Encarni Montoya, The Open University

I am an ecologist (environmental biologist) interested in studying the vegetation dynamics of tropical forests. Given the magnitude of the tropics, I have focused my research efforts on different forests from Venezuela and more recently, Ecuador.

A single tropical tree can live more than 1000 years, so for studying the dynamics of the tropical forests in the time scale or range in which they live, I have to look for evidence of how these forests have interacted with the environment from the past until the present day. To do this I use the fossil record in what it is called palaeo-ecological approach. In other words, I’m interested in the ecology of the past.

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Mercury: new views on the Sun’s most innermost planet

Posted on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 by David Rothery

Prof. David Rothery, The Open Univeristy, delivering his lecture

Prof. David Rothery, The Open University, delivering his lecture. Photo: Kate Bradshaw

I’m a geologist who now works mostly on other worlds, and the one that is keeping me busiest at present is Mercury. This is the closest planet to the Sun, which means that is always much closer to Earth than Jupiter ever gets.

However, it is harder to study because the Sun’s glare makes it difficult to observe with telescopes, and the Sun’s gravity poses an enormous challenge if you want to get a spacecraft into orbit about Mercury.

NASA achieved this with its MESSENGER orbiter (2011-2015), and I’m on the science team for the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo orbiter 2024-2025, due for launch in later 2016.

2015 Science Matters Lecture
I recently introduced school students, teachers and members of the public from Milton Keynes to my research at the 2015 Science Matters lectures.

You can watch a recording of my talk below.

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Code-breaking challenges

Posted on Monday, 26 January 2015 by Mairi Walker

Mairi Walker, The Open University

Late last year, pupils from St Paul’s Catholic School in Milton Keynes gathered only 3 miles away from Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing famously cracked the Enigma code during the Second World War, to take part in their own code-breaking challenge.

Small teams of Year 9 pupils battled it out in a series of tasks requiring them to decrypt secret messages as quickly as possible.

The event was organised by me and my fellow Open University maths PhD student and STEM Ambassador, David Martí Pete. We were aiming to give pupils a broader sense of what maths is really about: solving problems.

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Engaging Research

An Open Research University: Embedding public engagement within the research culture of the OU

Category Archives: School-University Engagement

Labcasts: Bringing cutting edge science to the classroom

Engaging schools with research opportunities

Engaging with neuropharmacology research

Towards a scholarship of engagement

Science communication for development

Children’s Science Television: Then And Now

Monsoon evolution

Back to the future II: Mad for mud!

Mercury: new views on the Sun’s most innermost planet

Code-breaking challenges