Hello Laurie
Social media, talking chickens and techno-birdboxes!
We use social media to directly engage with the public -- as a hook for computer Science.
We have a soft toy (that we made earlier) that reads out messages from twitter. Visitors are invited to tweet with a particular hashtag and this gets them engaged. Once engaged, visitors change the code or build their own soft toy to do something else on twitter (e.g. we've had battle of the celebs/football clubs). Finally we encourage visitors to video or photograph the chicken reading out the tweet and share it on social media, or invite their own friends to tweet to interact with their modified creation and version of the code.
There's a video of it in the lab -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX4dQ4nMX7c . If I've got more time I can drag out of it in use.
We also use social media with the bird box project -- we are developing workshops for people to build a bird box that tweets about bird activity. e.g. triggers a web cam when a bird enters the nest box and posts it to twitter. For us it's a good way of providing an activity that involves some coding for participants to customise (e.g. process the data, compute summaries and post what they're interested to twitter,Facebook etc. -- we provide the tools for their imagination).
We're working on scaling it up to citizen science project. There's info about it here http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1993 and http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/04/12-things-to-make-raspberry-pi
Basically we found social media is a great hook, and a good way of connecting up with people (then using their word of mouth to spread the message more), and we use that to get them to explore some of the technology involved.
Please feel free to get in touch if you want any more info
Andrew
Dr Andrew Robinson
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
On 4 Dec 2012, at 09:30, Laurie Winkless wrote:
> Morning all,
>
> I've been asked to write a comment piece on how (or if) social media is having an impact on science* and wondered if any of the lovely members of the PSCI-COM list would like to offer some input on this :)
>
> Here are a few starter questions to start the brain's starter motors on this freezing Tuesday morning (* For "Science" please read engineering, research, social, physical, biological, chemical etc.)
> • Are you a researcher who uses social media? If so, has it influenced how you do or talk about your work?
> • Have you had any interaction with colleagues or collaborators via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc?
> • Have you used any social media outlet to carry out your own research (e.g.. citizen science, surveys etc)?
> • Are you a science communicator or journalist who has used social media to interact or get into contact with scientists?
> • Have you come across any particularly fun or interesting science news on social media sites that has helped you as a communicator or researcher?
> • Do you have any interesting examples of how you or colleagues have interacted via social media? Both positive and negative examples are very welcome!
> • I think we probably agree that social media is a great outlet to talk about your research, and may even help to change the perception of scientists / scientific research in the long term, but do you feel that social media has had any impact on science, in terms of the type or quality of research carried out in the UK or abroad?
>
> Right, well I think that should be enough to get you started! Any help you could offer would be extremely welcome - I'd love to see what the general impression is on the topic - it might help to inspire me!
>
> PS: I have a pretty tight deadline on this article (14th December) so your input would be very much appreciated.
>
> Thank you all in advance :)
>
> Laurie
>
> Higher Research Scientist and Science Ambassador
> National Physical Laboratory
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