ScienceOnline made my head explode!

People who know me know how excited I get by ideas. The pace and pitch of my voice increases and my hands move wildly like the lovechild of Peter Garrett and Kermit the Frog. My mind leaps from one thing to another as I furiously try to fit all of these new pieces into an enormous jigsaw puzzle, connecting little islands of thought into scenes of clarity.

In this state, it is incredibly difficult to compose a crisp piece of writing. I’m feeling anything but ‘flow’ at the moment. It’s more like a car wash, coming from all directions. But I wanted to share some of the things that have resonated with me since attending the ScienceOnline Watch Party on the weekend.

ScienceOnline is a conference that happened in the USA last week. The theme is “Conversations, community and connections at the intersection of science and the web”. Before the event, Sarah Keenihan, Kristin Alford and I chose four sessions from the ScienceOnline ‘menu’, grouped losely into two themes: Our audience – Why won’t the deficit model die? and Persuading the unpersuadable – communicating science to deniers, cynics and trolls; and self awareness – We are who we are? Who are we? Issues of identity and the internet, and Life in the venn – What happens when you’re forced to wear many hats? There have been many blogs and Storify collations of ScienceOnline, too many to link to right now. I might come back and do it, but I suggest you just google them (or just look at Bridge8′s list here.)

All of the sessions were great and stimulated lost of thinking and conversation. Sarah has already written about juggling roles and identity as a response to those sessions, and both she and Kristin have written responses to the session on ‘persuading the unpersuadable’ (Sarah’s here, Kristin’s here). Which is convenient really, because the one that has been going through my head the most is the one on the deficit model.

But why that one? Well, I’m a nerd really (and identify with nerds culturally – reference session on identity) and my Discipline is Science Communication. The theory of science communication lights me up, because it helps me understand what I do and helps me do what I do better. I have worn, and still wear, many hats as I move(d) from scientist to science communicator to researcher (reference session on hats) and the theory is what helps bring all of those things together. I can combine all of those hats into one when I think of my core interest: How people relate to science and technology in food production. Also, I have been reading about the deficit model for a couple of things for work at the moment, so it’s been churning around in my mind. My third reason for focusing on that here follows on from our #onsci twitter chat last night where we discussed the deficit model more broadly and I’m taking the opportunity to explain it and my thinking in more that 140 characters.

Science communication is still a relatively new discipline, and I’m beginning to think it has the wrong name but haven’t come up with a better one. Basically we are a bunch of people who work at the intersection of science and society. Some people are scientists who do outreach, talking to schools, community groups, the media. Some people are science journalists or writers, writing for the masses. Some people have a qualification in science communication and may be working for research organisations, developing and delivering programs to inform and engage people. Some may be educators, working in the non-formal/informal space. Some may be researchers, coming from a history and philosophy of science perspective, trying to uncover how we as a society engage with scientific ideas. There are probably others that I’ve missed. I have been (and arguably still am) most of the roles on this list, but it is the last role that, at the moment, excites me the most.

For most of my career, I have worked within a deficit model of science communication. I have paraphrased this as “If you knew what I knew, you’d like it too” (although I better a better paraphrase is “I believe there’s a space in your head. I’m going to fill it with information and then you will act differently”). By this I mean that this was the underlying philosophy/strategy of the program I worked on. Even my title, Education Officer, made this quite clear. I was there to educate you, because there was stuff you didn’t know, and you needed to know it so that you could make informed (better) decisions. I talked to a lot of people that were cynical (reference session on persuading the unpersuadable). I knew we needed to change, but my scientific training didn’t equip me with the skills I needed to address it as a research question. So I went back to Uni to learn how people do research into how people learn and I learned about constructivism.This theory of learning suggests that people have unique sets of experiences and these will influence their learning. New information becomes integrated, filtered and constructed in light of these experiences. I also learned about research in the social sciences; how and why to do it. Now I’m focusing on understanding what people think about science in food and why. In particular, I’m interested in how ideas about science in food have been constructed socially and culturally.

I believe the deficit model needs to die, and die soon, but I sense an anxiousness about this among others in science communication, particularly those who are coming from a more sciencey perspective. “But people NEED information” I hear. Throwing out the deficit model does not mean we can’t give people information. It does not mean that scientists can’t talk about their work, or that they should start to feel anxious about what model of science communication they are using. I think the key message for scientists is that it is more important than ever that they talk about their science with the passion and the ability to go into detail that only they can do. But, recognise that people are not the same as you minus the sciencey bit. They have constructed a meaning for the world already on the information they have, based on their experiences, background etc. Your information will need to become integrated with that somehow if you want to change their behaviour.

So where do we go if we kill the deficit model? I believe that constructivism goes a long way to developing a new model without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and losing the information part of the process. And here’s where I become frustrated with science communication as a discipline; education (as a discipline) has been grappling with this for some time. Education researchers have been writing and publishing about it for years. Why are we only starting to think about it in science communication now? Aren’t we all learners? Working at an interface is tricky, and lonely sometimes. Science communicators in practice (the people that talk science) are often in and of science. The people that research how people relate to scientific ideas are usually not, often in education or the social sciences. The distances between the two groups can feel enourmous at times. I physically work at two different campuses and have two different contracts for each role so I feel the gap between science communication practice and research quite keenly. As a science communicator I was not encouraged to keep up the date with the research literature, despite being in an environment that was completely devoted to knowledge and evidence. The theory and complexity of what I did (and do) was often invisible to my scientist collegues. Then again, I would not expect scientists to become experts in my discipline, just as I don’t expect to become an expert in theirs. But we have to work together.

I’m am so excited about having more dialogue between researchers and practitioners in this space in the future because we won’t ever make any headway if we allows the silos to persist. And it also means that I can stop talking to myself.

Silos at Wallaroo

Back into the swing of things

I can’t believe my last post was July. Since then many ideas for posts have been jotted down in notebooks and on pieces of paper. Some have been half written and are sitting in drafts. Others are half composed in my head. I blinked in July and suddenly it was November and I felt like I hadn’t achieved anything. My year of downshifting did not go to plan and I was as busy as ever. Life threw up the usual smeggy stuff and that, along with the energy and time dedicated to continuously juggling two roles, just didn’t leave time for much else.

But I’ve had a holiday since then, one of the better ones. I spent time with my family, made some stuff and tried something new. I’ve taken a deep breath, reflected on what I did achieve and have some new strategies to try and make it all a little bit easier.

Wallaroo

This year I’m going to try not to juggle so much. There is so much evidence around that we humans are not good at multitasking very much, so I’m going to try to limit it. I attended two wonderful workshops by Maria Gardiner from Thinkwell last year that really pulled together what I had already started to think and feel about the way I work. Maria’s background as a cognitive behavioural coach and clinical psychologist means that she unpacks the flawed thinking that so many of us in academia have about work. Basically, I’m inefficient. Maybe I’m being hard on myself, but if I’m going to get where I want to go then I need to become more efficient. I can’t physically make more time in a day to get through my long to-do list, so something has to change. I looked at my work habits logically and I kept a time diary for two weeks, much like you would a spending diary before preparing a budget. I realised that, even after all this time, I grossly underestimate the time it takes to do things and I don’t allow for any contingency in a day. I realised my to-do list, which always has about 20 things on it, would realistically take a couple of weeks, partly because I only worked two days per week in each job. I dedicated a lot of headspace to creating, prioritising and re-prioritising the lists, trying to remember where I was up to the last time I was in that office as things seemed to come up with twice the speed they were supposed to, because I only worked in each role less than half the time. No wonder I would go to sleep at night feeling terrible that I hadn’t got enough things done. I was setting myself an impossible task and wasting time and energy thinking about it. This year I’m diarising the tasks (with a time allotment), leaving contingency in a day and saying “no” a lot more. If my diary is full then I can’t take on a new task … and I still have so many things to do.

My friend Kristin Alford also passed on another tool to me at the end of last year and I’m giving it a shot too. She suggested the personal kanban which is based in management ideas that I came across in my organisational theory studies. Sure, I still have a lot of things on the to-do list, but I can’t do 20 things at once. I can probably manage 3-5 and this will force me to only have those 3-5 things in my ‘doing’ list at any one time. I’m going to allow things to go backwards into the ‘backlog’ pile as well as moving into the ‘done’ pile, but I already feel like only carrying around a ‘doing’ list of a few things, rather than a ‘to-do’ list that’s impossible is making me feel a lot lighter.

I guess, on the whole, I’m trying not to struggle against it all so much. Things are the way they are and I just need to work with it, and make it work for me a little better.

I’m also planning on starting a new blog this year that’s more specific to my research. I will probably cross-post some of that here too, but I expect that this site will become a home for stuff on science communication and agriculture and for more reflective pieces (such as this one).

Tomorrow I’m heading off to the Adelaide ScienceOnline Watch Party organised by Sarah Keenihan (see her recent post here) and I expect I’ll be writing a few posts after that.

I’m really looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

So, what IS permeate?

Today I butted in on a twitter conversation. [View the story "So what is permeate?" on Storify] The question that caught my eye was this:

What is permeate?

I’ve been following the discussion about permeate and I knew that Lynne Strong from Clover Hill Dairies had recently posted something on the subject.

Now my friends who were having the original discussion are not your average consumers. They are scientists! They felt frustrated that they could not find the answers that they were looking for. They could find out that permeate was a natural by-product of milk processing, but could not find out what it actually was.

So I decided to do some research and find out for myself.

I should add that I find the biochemistry of lactation fascinating and I very nearly did my PhD on it. Lactation defines and unites us as mammals on a biological level as well as having a huge social and cultural role in human society. But I digress. Before I talk about the ‘science’ of permeate, I need to describe the chemistry of milk.

What is milk?

Milk is just amazing really. Of course the composition differs with species but essentially milk has the same components: water; proteins; fats and carbohydrates.

Milk proteins include caseins, which are large (in molecular weight) and will become solid in acidic conditions (pH4.6 for cows milk) which is how we make cheese. The proteins which stay in solution during cheese making are called whey proteins (or milk serum proteins) and include lactoglobulin, lactalbumin etc.

There are a number of different types of fats in milk and it varies between and within species. In non-homogenised milk, the fat of milk will eventually float to the surface.

Milk carbohydrates include lactose (milk sugar) but there are other carbohydrates aswell such as glucose and galactose..

Other milk constituents include milk salts (some of which include calcium) that can be bound to proteins or not, cellular metabolites, trace elements (vitamins and minerals) and a few other things.

So what IS permeate?

The diagram in Lynne’s post shows milk entering a factory and some of it going of for cheese making through a process called ultrafiltration. This filtration separates the large proteins (the caseins) and the fats for cheese making and leaves the rest – the permeate. Although whole milk is used in cheese making, adding extra fat and protein makes a better cheese (according to my quick scan of websites etc).

At this point it’s important to remember that permeate is a word meaning stuff that passes through a membrane full of pores, in the same way that filtrate is what passes through a filter. It’s about as meaningful on it’s own as the word ‘leftovers’. It is also why whole milk does not contain permeate, but it does contain all the things that are in permeate.

So what’s in the milk permeate?

This fact sheet from the Dairy Manufacturers Sustainability Council describes ultrafiltration as removing molecules with a molecular weight of 10,000 – 150,000 and a pore size of 0.005-0.1 micrometre. A quick scan for research articles on the composition of milk permeate pulled out this article which states it contains water, lactose, minerals and some nitrogenous compounds (presumably amino acids). The precise composition of milk permeate will vary from factory to factory and season to season, depending on the size of their filters, and the lactose and other content of the milk from the cows supplying the factory.

So what does this all mean?

Lynne has explained what this all means for her dairy and other producers like her in this post. Permeate comes from milk and was added to some milk to standardise it in terms of fat and protein content. While the move to ‘permeate-free’ does mean more whole milk is needed, it also means potentially that a ‘waste’ product from milk production won’t be used. However, while researching for this post I found that groups such as the Dairy Manufacturers Sustainability Council have been promoting ways to remove everything from milk, leaving behind the water that can be used in other processing operations. And that sounds like a good deal to me!

Communicating science blogging workshop

I’m so excited! This week, the University of Adelaide is running it’s first ever Communicating Science course as a winter intensive postgraduate course.

I’m going to be giving some lectures, but right now I’m sitting in a computer suite and all our students are being shown how to set up their very first blogs with James Byrne and Mike Seyfang.  These brand new blogs are:

scienceisagoodidea.wordpress.com

noquickchange.wordpress.com

scientrifficoutreach.wordpress.com

iwillcommunicatescience.wordpress.com

talkwritelistenscience.wordpress.com

entomolecularblog.wordpress.com

xuexie0303.wordpress.com

allabouteggs.wordpress.com

Please be extra nice to them while they take baby steps into the bright, scary, online world!!

Here is a link to James’ prezi

And another useful link is the University of Adelaide’s social media guide, which is found on their social media blog and can be downloaded here

Does ‘getting it wrong’ bring us closer to getting it right?

This morning my twitter feed was swamped with comments from agricultural producers about the new advertisements by Woolworths. The conversation was prompted by a blog post from Lynne Strong on how the advertisements made her feel. As you can see from her blog, Lynne has worked hard to present a very different view of agriculture than that presented in the ads. I’m compiling a collection of tweets using storify which will be added here shortly. The main issue was that the images of farmers and rural life in general was not consistent with the ‘professional and caring’ image that the industry want to portray to consumers. Recently a Senate report on “higher education and skills training to support agriculture and agribusiness in Australia” called for a “re-writing of the agricultural narrative” (p 45). It would seem that Woolworths just didn’t get that memo.

This morning’s conversation reminded me of another recent and spectacular “image fail”. Last week, Science, it’s a girl thing, a campaign to attract girls into the sciences exploded online (as recorded by my friend Mike Seyfang using Storify) and led to a number of articles such as this one in The Conversation by Helen Maynard-Casely and this one in The Punch by Tory Shepard. Again, most of the commentary I saw was from women in science who said the images did not represent them and should be used to promote their profession to others.

Although, in both examples, the people complaining about the campaigns are not the target market, the images of who they are and what they do are being used by someone else to sell something. In the “Science, it’s a girl thing” it is a career in science, something which all people in science, not just women, feel very strongly about. My understanding is that this campaign is now being re-thought.

Of course, Woolworths are trying to move product, which may be the only consideration, but they are doing it by appropriating and perpetuating an image of agriculture that many people, me included, have been trying to change for a number of years. Yes, characters are important in any story, but I’m sure there are other characters that could be included to provide that ‘entertainment’ value that’s arguably needed in advertising.

The difference between the two campaigns is that one was put together for a government agency and it seems, has been withdrawn. The other is for a commercial company, who are, perhaps ironically, a sponsor of the Australian Year of the Farmer. I wonder if there was any consultation with agricultural producers, or consumers for that matter, at all?

Both campaigns strike deeply at people’s individual identities and misrepresent who people are and what drives them. For both groups these identities are hard-forged. I think that’s why they have both made people angry.

However, both campaigns have sparked conversations which I hope will grow into postitive changes. Both have caused the communities to articulate the kinds of images that they do want to portray and to talk about the real barriers to ensuring that young people (of both genders) see agriculture and science as good places to be. I know it’s not possible to please everyone with these kinds of campaigns, but I’m optimistic that with each time we get something wrong, we are closer to getting it right.

Ingredients for learning about food production

One of my favourite cooking utensils is a hand beater that I inherited from my grandmother. All the paint has worn off, but it has a good weight to it and the action still feels smooth. It has a nice sound, and using it reminds me of her and the times I’d help her cook.

I started learning about food from my grandparents. Visiting them and helping to prepare the Sunday roast are among my strongest memories. Both of my parent’s parents had small suburban back yards with vegetables gardens tucked away up the back. Grandpa would take me out to get carrots, zucchinis and chokos. With Gran I’d pick the mint to go into the mint sauce. Poppa would take me get some apple cucumbers if we were having a salad, parsnips for a roast and I remember picking and shelling bags of peas with Grandma. Some even made it to the pot! At Grandma’s we’d also have stewed rhubarb, straight from the garden, with sago for sweets.

Like many people working in agriculture, I was disappointed with the results of the recent survey undertaken by the Primary Industries Education Foundation that showed very low levels of knowledge of food and fibre production in Australian school children. I have followed the development of the Foundation from a Network started in 2004 and programs I’ve worked on feature in the original scoping study published in 2005. But my disappointment was more than general frustration at the survey’s findings. I am only one of a whole bunch of people who have been talking to community groups, the general public, school teachers and school students about agriculture for a decade or so now. So were we wasting our time? I’d like to believe we weren’t.

Of course we need to increase awareness of the opportunities that agriculture provides to learn within a whole range of curriculum areas such as science, geography, history, nutrition and health and even design studies. We also need to ensure that excellent resources are provided to give teachers the confidence to present material that they initially may be unfamiliar with, and I’m delighted that the work of the PIEF can continue.

But I don’t think the disconnection of urban Australians with food production is solely a product of a lack of agricultural education in schools. While I (and many others) would like to see more, agriculture has been there. This means that I don’t think we are going to solve the problem with school-based programs alone. I think we need to look further. We need to understand the social and cultural environment in contemporary Australia that led us to this situation and I’m hoping to explore this further in my research.

However I do think there is an obvious contributor to the situation we’re in, based on my own personal experience. I didn’t start learning about food production in school. I learned about it at home, or more correctly, in my grandparents’ homes. Once a generation or two of busy urban Australians lost that connection and understanding, the chain of knowledge was broken. And I think that learning about food production at school will only have a real, enduring impact if it’s supported by what happens at home.

Perhaps I’m impatient, but I don’t want to wait for today’s school children to grow up before our society values food production and all that goes into it. I want to see more programs that involve today’s adults, so that they both teach their children and support what their children are learning at school. Of course, without a curriculum, a classroom and a teacher, programs for adults are a lot tricker to do.

I’ve been thinking for some time that the key to this has to be food. Everyone eats, and food would provide the perfect vehicle for food producers to explain why they do what they do to people from the city. But would only a one-way conversation, which would never really work. The most profound learning experiences are those based on dialogue, exchange, shared learning. I believe it is equally as important for producers to understand consumers as it is the other way around. Last week I came across a journal article that discussed the relatively conservative eating habits of rural Australians and I’m beginning to think that this could be the opportunity for exchange that would be needed. The urbanites would share what they know about preparing the diverse food that makes up modern Australian cuisine and rural food producers could share what they do to produce the foods. Preparing and eating meals together could provide a very powerful way for people to engage and exchange ideas.

So I’ve started to enrol people that excel at turning ideas into something while I let the idea percolate for a while. I think, ultimately, it’s going to have to be up to other people to make this happen. I might have the occasional good idea but I’m not so great on the follow through and I already have more on my plate than I can manage. As long as I get an invite to that inaugural city/country banquet, I’ll be happy!

 

Bringing story back

One of the things that’s really important to me as a science communicator is telling stories. I certainly didn’t invent the idea of moving towards a more narrative way of describing science, and I know that I’m not the only one that feels that storytelling is key to more engagement in science. In fact, it was this idea in particular which lead to the creation of the #onsci (“on science”) twitter chats that started last year after the Inspiring Australia conference. But now I feel that I’m actually starting to put my ideas into practice and it’s exciting!

Recently an article that I wrote (with Waite scientist Matt Gilliham) was published on Scientific American’s guest blog. It still makes me want to do a happy dance when I think about it. I was really lucky that Matt was prepared to indulge my ideas, both when pitching and writing the story, and that his research had such a good story behind it. I’m also really lucky to be working in science communication right now.

I have actually been working in science communication for more than 10 years in various guises. As recently as 3 years ago, using blogging and other social  media tools as a way to communicate science was not considered by research organisations, at least not the ones I knew about. Almost all of our communications activities were focused on the mainstream media, newspapers in particular, which lead to a formula for writing science. Of course I understand a particular style of writing is needed to catch the attention of someone who only bought the paper to line the budgie cage. But now, with blogs etc, we have intentional, deliberate readers who want to be inspired and amazed, rather than accidental readers who we hope will read enough words to think ‘science is important’ before they turn the page.

I have always been interested in telling stories about science and I didn’t realise how different this was from ‘conventional’ science communication until very recently, when another science communicator was providing some feedback on something I’d written. She gave me some direct feedback on the statements attributed to her organisation, but then she gave me some advice on how the article should have been written; more stress on the impact of the work, especially at the beginning. I hadn’t written to the formula.

My decision to not write to the formula was deliberate. We’ve been taught that science articles should look something like: researchers have solved a problem, what the problem is & why it is important, how they did it (sciencey bit), why this research is important and how the results of the research will be delivered to solve the problem. But not all research is a breakthrough. Most breakthroughs happen because teams of scientists have worked hard for a long time on a small piece in a big puzzle. Often they aren’t exactly sure which puzzle the piece belongs to, and the picture on the front of the box can be absent, wrong or incomplete.

Do we really want to know how the story ends at the beginning? I’m interested in telling the kinds of stories that meander; that describe surprise, creativity, discovery and disappointment

Although it’s only one post, I feel like I’ve finally made a start. I hope it’s the first of many!