Designing public-centric forms of public engagement with research

Posted on Monday, 27 April 2015 by Nick Mahony

Dr Nick Mahony

What happens if we put ‘the public’ at the centre of our efforts to conceptualise, conduct and evaluate publicly engaged research?

Written by Dr. Nick Mahony, a new Open University pamphlet outlines a public-centric approach to engagement you can make use of in your own settings.

‘Designing public-centric forms of public engagement with research’ by Dr. Nick Mahony is available for free download, under a Creative Commons licence.

Drawing on insights from recent empirical research and key strands of the theoretical literature on the public the pamphlet foregrounds a set of questions you can ask at key stages of the engagement process to help you make choices about how you will engage.

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ON AIR – a sound installation

Posted on Monday, 23 March 2015 by Caroline Devine

Caroline Devine, Composer and Sound Artist

ON AIR was commissioned by the Open University to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Harold Wilson’s University of the Air speech. Four artists were commissioned, one in each of the UK’s component nations, each with a different remit in terms of the academic knowledge to be represented. I was selected to make the work for the English commission, the theme of which was Design and Technology.

I conceived ON AIR as a multi-channel sound installation that would form an acoustic layer throughout the campus. I wanted to present fragments of the knowledge, ideas and voices of the Open University floating throughout the campus – as though vestiges of the output of the OU are always present on the air currents throughout the site and are made temporarily audible by the work. By using a large number of hidden sound sources, the work would completely transform the experience of the space without visual trace.

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A Guide to Key Working: further afield

Posted on Sunday, 22 March 2015 by John Oates

Dr John Oates, The Open University

As I have written in earlier posts, we have been seeking new ways to disseminate the results of our ‘key working’ project on ways of co-ordinating support for families with children or young people with special educational needs and disabilities.

While presenting at an international conference on mental health, I was introduced to the head of the child guidance service of the Caribbean island of St Lucia, who was also presenting.

In conversation, it turned out that she had already come across the Early Support developmental journals that we produced before our keyworking research, and is successfully using them across the island to help support families with children with special educational needs and disabilities.

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Celebrating excellence in engaged research

Posted on Tuesday, 3 March 2015 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, The Open University

The winners of the Open University’s 2015 Engaging Research Award Scheme were announced in early February 2015.

The scheme was devised as part of the Open University’s RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research Catalyst. It was designed to find and celebrate high-quality engaged research at the OU, demonstrating the different ways that researchers meaningfully interact with various stakeholders over any or all stages of a research process, from issue formulation, the production or co-creation of new knowledge, to knowledge evaluation and dissemination.

As the Chair of the Assessment Panel, I was extremely grateful to the six judges for their careful assessments of the entries. I was particularly delighted that two of the winners for the 2014 Engaging Research Award Scheme, Thea Herodotou and Natalia Kucirkova, agreed to act as judges for this 2015 competition.

2015 Engaging Research Award Winners: L-R: Richard Holliman, Paul Stenner, Katy Jordan, Graham Pike, Rosa Hoekstra, Francesca Benatti (on behalf of Elton Barker), Alan Bassindale, Verina Waights, Martin Weller, Cindy Kerawalla, Saskia van Manen and Fiona McKerlie

2015 Engaging Research Award Winners and Highly Commended Entries: L-R: Richard Holliman, Paul Stenner, Katy Jordan, Graham Pike, Rosa Hoekstra, Francesca Benatti (on behalf of Elton Barker), Alan Bassindale, Verina Waights, Martin Weller, Cindy Kerawalla, Saskia van Manen and Fiona McKerlie. Photo: Chris Valentine.

The standard of the entries to this round of the scheme was very high, with the judging panel awarding prizes to three winners of the scheme as well as recognizing six further highly commended entries.

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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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New! Research Data Catalogue

Posted on Monday, 23 February 2015 by Isabel Chadwick

This post was originally posted on The Orb, the Open University’s open research blog, by Isabel Chadwick, Research Data Management Librarian at the Open University

The Research Data Management project is working to build a suite of tools which will enable OU researchers to manage, share, publish and archive their research data. I am pleased to announce that the first tool in this suite, the Research Data Catalogue is now live.

The Research Data Catalogue is facilitated by a new item type – “Research Dataset Record” – in ORO, the OU’s institutional repository. At this stage, ORO can only accept records which describe research datasets (what they are and how they can be accessed) the datasets themselves should not be deposited in ORO.

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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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Towards an oral history of Hiroshima. Part Two: Witnessing

Posted on Monday, 15 December 2014 by Elizabeth Chappell

Interviewees from Hiroshima 2014

Elizabeth Chappell, The Open University, and interviewees

‘We live in an era of the witness’, wrote Annette Wienorka in her 2006 book, The Era of the Witness. I recently gave a talk on witnessing the survivors of Hiroshima for the English department of the Open University Post Graduate Research conference held on 22 November 2014 at the OU’s Camden Centre. I spent the last part of my travel grant, provided by the Great British Sasakawa Foundation, on a trip to Hiroshima in September this year. During this trip I interviewed about a dozen witnesses — known as hibakusha in Japanese — as well as those who work with or study the history of the hibakusha, (from hibaku, explosion, and sha, person, in Japanese).

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Blog 3. The interviews are nearly done!

Posted on Tuesday, 9 December 2014 by Emma Rothero

Emma Rothero, The Open University

In my previous post, I wrote that we were ready to ask the questions but I was worried no one would want to answer.

Well, I needn’t have been concerned. We’ve completed 14 semi-structured interviews and have two more to do. We have written up the interviews we’ve done as draft case studies and I am just sorting out the process of getting the interviews transcribed.

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