This week 4,000 ocean scientists are descending upon the very landlocked Salt Lake City for the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting. This meeting, co-sponsored by The Oceanography Society, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography and the American Geophysical Union, is one of the biggest in ocean science and is only held every other year.
Dr. Bik and I will be there getting our science on, looking good (well, Holly always looks good, but I’ll actually be in conference-wear and not dirty jeans and ship-themed t-shirts!) and representing Deep Sea News. We’re running a social media workshop on Monday evening, with Andrew Thaler of Southern Fried Science. (RickMac, alas, is off saving coral reefs and couldn’t make it.) While there is a glorious proliferation of science outreach workshops at Ocean Sciences Meeting, I suspect that ours will be the most hilarious and borderline inappropriate. Here’s the description:
Social media platforms have made it possible to access and disseminate information quickly, while bypassing gatekeepers common to traditional media. Ease of accessibility and the pervasiveness of social media provides a powerful tool for reaching many people directly. Experts can interact with the general public, leaving it to the audience to judge the value of their work. These tools for education, outreach, and activism have drawbacks. Without the quality control provided by editors and fact checkers, misinformation can be rampant and credibility compromised. Complicated messages can be difficult to deliver, target audiences can be challenging to segment, and there are few metrics for success. The objective of this session is for participants to share and discuss their experiences using social media for public outreach. We encourage participants to present specific examples, challenges, and lessons learned, and to discuss positive or negative interactions with online media. We also encourage broader, conceptual discussions of the role of social media in scientific and conservation discourse. This workshop will be a moderated but informal discussion, and we encourage participation from all attendees.
For more information visit: http://science-social-media.wikispaces.com/
After the workshop we’ll all head out for some cavorting for the first Ocean Sciences Meeting tweet-up. If you ever wanted to drink with the infamous ocean bloggers, now’s your chance.
If you’re interested in our research:
- WEDNESDAY: Dr. Bik will be presenting a poster in the 174 Ecosystem Science In The Gulf Of Mexico session.
- WEDNESDAY: Andrew Thaler of Southern Fried Science is presenting a poster co-authored with our own Kevin Zelnio in the 162 Advances In Phylogeography And Connectivity Of Marine Metazoans.
- THURSDAY: I’ll be presenting a poster in the 186 Biological Oceanography General Session.
Come say hi!
