Fun Science Books from #scio13

Way back in February, ScienceOnline motivated me to read some great science books. Thanks to the publishers, I won / received copies of David Quammen's Spillover and Barbara Natterson-Horowitz / Kathryn Bowers' Zoobiquity. Both were terrific. I reviewed them on Goodreads & would like to share the reviews here too.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

it was TERRIFIC - great investigation, great writing, scary topic. Quammen's writing is amazing. I'm not really a non-fiction girl, but this was interesting, science-y, and moved along quickly. Like a Michael Crichton novel, only real and better written.

Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz

This was a great, relatively easy read. It covers how similar diseases occur in both humans and animals. Each chapter reads like a good, long magazine article about a topic - like STDs, adolescence, cancer, obesity, and more. I won my copy at ScienceOnline 2013 and had the great fortune to befriend co-author Kathryn Bowers, who signed my copy. There's some good neuroscience in here too!

Think Like a Cat: How to Raise a Well-Adjusted Cat--Not a Sour Puss

by Pam Johnson-Bennett

I'm skimming through this - I got the first edition on Interlibrary Loan & liked it so much that I bought it. :-) I consider myself a kitty whisperer, but I'm learning some fun new things in this book. The tips about how to play with your cat (and how often: 1-2x per day, for 10-15 minutes each) are useful. Finally learned what the whiskers on the forepaws are for: "to sense any movement of prey trapped under the cat's front paws." The book gives good tips on how to desensitize cats to the scary experience of going to the vet. Most of these involve food. :-) While my kittehs aren't scared of the vet, reading this section made me appreciate my vet more, because they do some of the non-food tips to make my cats feel more comfortable while in the examining room. The book is full of good information for new & old-timey cat owners!

Thoughts from #scio13

As usual, ScienceOnline was a terrific conference. It neatly combines so many of my interests: science, reading (because there are so many writers in attendance), social media, and good food.  Here are some of the sessions I enjoyed, along with links to a blog or Storify page (Storifies?) for more information.

These are roughly in conference order, and any omissions are inadvertent.

My first session was a pre-conference workshop "Monitoring and analyzing one's effectiveness on social media" (Storify) taught by Nature Communities staffers Lou Woodley and Laura Wheeler. Lou and Laura talked about some great tools for monitoring social media use. Two that I want to check out in more detail are

• Topsy (which lets you search tweets back to 2010, among other things
• Twiangulate (which lets you compare 2-3 twitter accounts for followers

Lou & Laura also prepared some amazing handouts, which will be available on the Nature website soon. I'll share them in the comments below when they are publicly available.

My next memorable session was "Narrative: What is it? How science writers use it?", facilitated by T. Delene Beeland and David Dobbs. This was the geekiest session for me, in which I got to see how science writing is made -- getting a behind-the-scenes look into how writers do their interviews and capture the little details which make all the difference. The best part was listening to Carl Zimmer talk about the research he had done for his recent piece in Wired ... which I had read days before (How Scientists Stalked a Lethal Superbug—With the Killer's Own DNA). 

The session I facilitated with Lali DeRosier, "#Hashtags in the Academy: Engaging Students with Social Media," was a great success. I've blogged about it and Storified it.

The converge sessions were all terrific, but I really enjoyed Baba Brinkman's evolution rap session. He demonstrated how to talk science in a wholly unexpected medium: rap. Check out his video Artificial Selection from his CD The Rap Guide to Evolution (which my library now owns)

There was more - so much more! but I'll stop now and blog more later.

"#Hashtags in the Academy" at #scio13 on Storify

@Lalsox and my session called #Hashtags in the academy: Engaging students with social media was a great success! We had lots of great conversation which generated some (unanswered) questions as well as some terrific ideas about using social media in the classroom.

Several attendees talked about using social media with their college / graduate students. Ideas like:

• @Cotesia1 / Marianne Alleyne has her Insect Physiology students create a "twitter lecture" in 25 tweets. Here's her Storify of those lectures. 
• @WhySharksMatter / David Shiffman has done a similar assignment with his marine biology students. Next time he teaches it, he promises to Storify them. 
• @2footgiraffe / Adam Taylor set up #scistuchat to encourage his high school students to chat with scientists via Twitter.
• @MelanieTbaum / Melanie Tannenbaum has just started using Twitter with her social psychology class: : @UIUCPsych201 Hashtag: #PSYC201.

There was additional discussion about students' digital footprint now and in the future and some unanswered questions. 

Take a peek at the Storify and feel free to comment on here or Twitter (using #tagacad). I'll add useful tweets to the Storify.

Engaging Students with Social Media, #TagAcad preso at #scio13

I'm so excited to be facilitating a conversation at ScienceOnline 13 called #Hashtags in the Academy: Engaging Students with Social Media with Lali DeRosier.

We want to talk with attendees -- as well as others around the interwebs -- about the role of social media in the high school and undergraduate classroom. 

Is it possible to engage students with Web 2.0 tools in ways that meaningfully support learning?  We will moderate a conversation about what’s worked and what hasn’t with social media in the classroom. 

Because it's ScienceOnline, we want the session to be reflective of the audience's interest / experiences, so Lali and I are going to be tweeting some questions to get the conversation started.

The questions are below ... Lali will tweet & Storify the first few questions, and I'll tweet & Storify the last few. Feel free to comment here or to reply to one of the upcoming tweets.

Librarians, I'm also interested in how y'all use social media to engage with your students, whether in a specific class or your discipline or your library as a whole. Comments from other non-teaching academics also welcome!

If you do comment, please use the hashtags #scio13 #TagAcad so Lali and I can track your comments.

Questions

• Do you use social media to engage with your students?
• What was your biggest social media success in the classroom? Failure?
• To what extent should social media be embedded in curriculum? Or used to supplement the curriculum?
• Are some social media tools more academic than others?
• How can we help students navigate their personal vs. academic / professional personas?
• How important is social media to our students’ future? As they consider jobs and/or graduate school?
• How does social media advance the content of the courses?
• Does social media improve the efficiency of communication?

• If you aren’t using social media to teach, what would make you start? 

Thanks for your feedback!

Librarians at ScienceOnline #scio13

Librarians like to organize information, such as our books (WorldCat is a prime example -- it's a catalog of over 10,000 U.S. and international libraries' holdings), photographs (see the Library of Congress' Tissandier Collection of 1,000 items documenting the early history of aeronautics), articles (medicine's PubMed database; education's ERIC database)... including ourselves.

We also like to go to conferences outside our own discipline, including the science / communicator conference ScienceOnline. See my post from last January "Non-Librarian Conferences, #Scio12, and #AEJMC." Fellow librarian and conference-goer John Dupuis prompted my post with his post Science Online 2012: Library and librarian sessions. He's been an amazing collector of librarians at past ScienceOnline conferences ... and this year, I'm going to try to collect #scio13 librarians in this post. I'm sad that this year's list doesn't include John (or Joe or Christina or Bonnie), but I am glad to see so many of my librarian fellows will be represented!

From this list of amazing people going to #scio13, I've picked out librarians & library-types (in alphabetical order by last name, starting with me):

• Stephanie Brown, the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Librarian. Twitter: @CogSciLibrarian; Web: http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/
• Hilary Davis, North Carolina State University Libraries, Associate Head, Collection Management. Web: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/hmdavis4/
• Kiyomi Deards, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Assistant Professor. Twitter: @KiyomiD; Web: http://libraryadventures.com
• Barrie Hayes, the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Bioinformatics and Translational Science Librarian
• Stephanie Holmgren, NIEHS, Library  & Information Services
• Trevor Owens, The Library of Congress, Digital Archivist. Twitter: @tjowens; Web: http://trevorowens.org
• Rene Tanner, Arizona State University, Life Science Librarian. Twitter: @renetanner1; Web: http://lib.asu.edu
• K.T. Vaughan, the University of North Carolina Health Sciences Library, Librarian. Web: 

  http://guides.lib.unc.edu/ktlv

The list includes a lot of scientists, writers, communicators, and even a science comedian. 

'Tis the season ... to be excited about ScienceOnline! 

How Librarians Can Help in Real Life, at #scio13, and more

Librarians are so helpful!
(Creative Commons image courtesy of
Christchurch City Libraries on Flickr) 

How do librarians help scientists? If you haven't worked with a good librarian, it's hard to know what we can offer and how we can be useful. I'd love to see a session at a scholarly conference (ScienceOnline, AEJMC, I'm looking at you!) where librarians model how we work our magic with patrons.

I envision a real-time demonstration of the "reference interaction"* between a librarian and a grad student or other patron type. *The term "reference interaction" is used to indicate the session where one of us meets with a researcher ("you") and asks questions about what kind of information you need. We then suggest resources tailored to your need and make sure you know how to use them. 

In my current position, as librarian for journalism & mass communication, recent questions have included:

• How to download the entire issue of magazine from HathiTrust 
• Information about online advertising rates for newspapers. Patron needs both the rates themselves as well as scholarly articles about online advertising for newspapers. 
• Looking for NBC News archives for possible use on Carolina Week. 
• Need scholarly articles on the history of social media for an independent study. 
• Fact-checking resources for a class of advanced editing students (list of resources) 

As a super librarian / information coach, I was able to help all of these patrons. But if you didn't know someone could help you find resources as diverse as these, you'd just go to Mr. Google (or Dr. Google Scholar; read my thoughts on this) and see if you could find something useful. 

Maybe you'd go to your favorite database -- many students would go to JStor to get scholarly articles because they'd learned about that terrific search engine in a class. BUT that would be unproductive, because JStor doesn't contain current articles in it (why? "moving wall") ... so if you wanted articles about the success of advertising for online newspapers, you'd get frustrated and go back to Mr. Google.  Or maybe you'd go to LexisNexis, because you've used it before. But you wouldn't find scholarly articles there ... so back you'd go to Mr. Google.

Another reason to talk to a librarian is that we work with folks from many disciplines and can often refer you to someone doing related work. For instance, Student A recently asked me how she'd find a list, (ideally with contact information) of African American newspapers. I pointed her to an excellent resource (the Gale Directory of Publications & Broadcast Media) AND mentioned that one of her colleagues, Student B, had used the resource to identify Latino media outlets. I suggested that Student A contact Student B for tips on how best to use the resource for this project.

These reference sessions generally take 10-30 minutes, depending on how detailed the question is and how knowledgeable the patron is about the resources available. Good librarians will make sure that you know the best resources to use AND that you know a few tips on how to make the resource(s) do what you want.

It's one thing to write about this in a blog post, or for librarians to study and discuss this amongst themselves.  There's got to be a way to show you what we do and how we can help ... so I propose a librarian demo at conferences to demystify our services and share resources with a broader audience.