Now, I am all for outreach, but this is singularly dreadful. Or rather, it feels like something that should be sent to a grant agency, not publically disseminated on arXiv, because that's just silly.
A better communicator is always a better scientist
That is the ludicrous claim of the title which is nowhere justified in the text.
Engaging in science communication improves the own understanding of the communicator. Indeed, concepts or ideas that look simple when used on a daily basis may reveal unexpected complexity if discussed with a non-expert audience. The contextualization of his/her own research also allows a better understanding of the implications and increases the self confidence. The visibility of the communicator among its community also benefits from its engagement in science communication. Finally, this engagement further helps to develop communication skills that will be useful to express ideas in any other professional situation.
Fair enough.
It is often thought that communication is at the expense of quality research.
Eh ? Who thinks that ? I've known people who fit into all parts of the science-communication quality map.
90degree South was a set of activities organized in the framework of the recent trip of G. de Wasseige, PhD student at the Interuniversity Institute for High Energies (ULB-VUB), to the South Pole. As a member of the IceCube collaboration, she has been selected to visit the IceCube neutrino telescope buried in the South Pole ice.
What she should therefore be doing is writing a bloody blog, not being third author on a "paper" about it.
This experiment contest was dedicated to primary and high school students. Open to science and non-science oriented students, the challenge was to design an experiment answering the question "Belgium-South Pole: what is the difference?". An international jury selected the 3 experiments that have been carried out at the South Pole.
That is not an experiment. That is an outreach activity. Sending people along to do outreach for the sake of it is fine, but that's not something that you write a paper about !
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08874
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I know a lot of institutes around here regard outreach as a waste of time, because although it keeps the taxpayers happy, it doesn't bring in funding or get the papers published (ie. quality research). It's a nice little item to fit on the third or fourth page of your CV, not something you should actually be wasting your time on. Like being on committees. Don't sign up for any that involve actually doing work, but make sure you're on some, so they know you're willing to help out around the place. See also investigating and doing research on different teaching techniques. (I've had several senior academics tell me not to include a paper about increasing classroom engagement on my CV or publication history, because it's not astronomy. It was a real experiment, damn it, even if it was just a pilot study.)
ReplyDeleteIn my ideal world, teaching and outreach would be just as highly regarded as your research output, and scientists would be trained in all of them, at least to the point where you can write a relatively engaging lecture for an audience of any skill set.
But yeah, this in particular sounds like a schmozzle of a paper.
Yep, there's tonnes of outreach-based activities that deserve peer-reviewed publication. Analysing new techniques for presentations, comparing methods statistically, data analysis methods that blur the line between outreach and science, etc. But, "we sent a student to Antarctica to do some outreach and she did a good job" is not a paper. It could be a blog post. It could even be a very good blog post, which isn't even intended to deride blog posts as lesser than papers - but they are different things.
ReplyDeleteOutreach being a skill just as much as research is, I wouldn't want it to be a requirement for a scientific position. Some people are just fundamentally bad at public communication but I wouldn't want this to restrict their research activities. I think I'd rather it was examined at an institutional level than an individual one : does our department have people doing enough outreach, and is everyone who is good at outreach actually doing outreach ? It absolutely needs to be the norm that researchers can spend some of their official time doing outreach if they want to (rather than fitting it in around everything else), but not an obligation. Of course, this all ties in with the "publish or perish" culture...
The title statement may not be supported by the paper's text, but it's absolutely a true statement. I'm actually rather surprised you feel otherwise. Doing science without communicating the results is of no use to anyone but the worker in question, and it's certainly not worthy of funding. The better you can communicate the results, the more useful they are. (Obviously there's a point of diminishing returns, but all other things being equal, someone who can successfuly communicate the science to N+1 people is a a more useful scientist than the one who can manage only N people. The "1" might just be inspired to switch fields and take the work to the next level.)
ReplyDeleteGreg Roelofs Oh, I absolutely know with certainty that the title is wrong. I encounter poor communicators in every single institute and every single conference I attend without exception. They cover the entire career range from PhD students up to retired professors. Some of them are terrible lectures, others are dreadful at preparing posters, many are lousy at public outreach, and quite a few are all-round awful.
ReplyDeleteWhat they're good at is the research process itself. Fortunately for them, other experts in their field are able, though not always without difficulty, to understand them. I can think of one example of a PhD student who communicated science (about anything else he was quite a lot of fun) almost entirely through equations. His professors could understand him, but he was still a lousy communicator.
Communication is definitely a nice skill to have, and some bare minimum is probably required to do science in the first place - but beyond that I don't see any hint that it affects analytical skills much at all. Turning that science into useful results is different from being able to do the science to begin with. Of course, it's open for a debate whether someone who does great science but doesn't tell anyone about it is still a good scientist, but you get the idea. :)
Rhys Taylor OK, I think I see where we diverged. I interpreted the title with an implicit "all other things being equal," and you didn't. I don't think your interpretation is what the author meant, but if it's the correct one, then I agree with your points.
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