ScienceOnline in Real Life

Finally I'm going to ScienceOnline! I wanted to go 2 years ago, but didn't have the nerve to sign up. I wanted to go a year ago, and although I found the nerve to sign up, I didn't go because I would be moving shortly and couldn't add One More Thing into my busy spring schedule. Now that I'm living in the Triangle, I'm going to ScienceOnline -- without even the hassle of a plane trip. Yippee!

As I read more about the workshops, program sessions, BlogMedia coverage and browse the list of participants, I get more and more excited. If you haven't heard of ScienceOnline, here's what excites me about it:

1. It's about science and collaboration, very broadly defined. I first heard about some of the folks involve at scio10 (as it's called) at the 2007 American Society for Information Science & Technology conference (which I blogged), and I realized that not only were some librarians doing cool stuff with technology, but some scientists were too. Jean-Claude Bradley impressed me as he talked about using wikis with his chemistry students; Bora Zivkovic neatly delineated different reasons for science blogging; and Janet Stemwedel talked about the value of blogging in the scientific process. Not only are scientists learning cool things about how the brain and mind work, but they are talking about it - so I was hooked both intellectually and technologically. I expect to witness and even participate in the science & technology at scio10.

2. Some cool librarians are attending. My e-buddy John Dupuis has collected a list of library people at Science Online 2010 at his great blog Confessions of a Science Librarian. I look forward to meeting him and some other science librarians I've met online over the years. Dorothea, who blogs as The Book of Trogool and I are doing a session creatively titled Scientists What can your librarian do for you?, with an accompanying wiki. I hope we get some good discussion and even learning as we try to give science folks the scoop on Libraries. If you can't attend, and you're a librarian or a scientist, check out Dorothea's slides as they are clever and informative.

3. A nice mashup of my interest in science, as evidenced by the "Science" in Cognitive Science and journalism, as evidenced by my new gig as librarian for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina.

Here are just a few of the sessions I want to attend ... tho' I'll probably only make it to half of these:

• PRI’s The World Science – Elsa Youngsteadt and Rhitu Chatterjee
• Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web – Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and David Dobbs
• Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents – Janet Stemwedel, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr.Isis
• Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM – Anne Jefferson
• Science and the mobile device – Christopher Perrien
• Tour of the NC Museum of Life + Science
• Blogging 102 – Dave Munger
• Repositories for Fun and Profit – Dorothea Salo
• Storyboarding your science video and posting it online – Mary Spiro

But really, it's 4: Awesome sessions for the science nerd at a level that a science aficionado can understand; advanced degree helpful but not required.