Tag Archives: iPad

Communities Happenings – 20th February

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Communities Happenings is a weekly post with news of interest to NPG’s online communities. The aim is to provide this info in one handy summary. Listings include tweetups and conferences which we’re attending and/or organising as well as new online tools, products or cool videos. We also occasionally flag up NPG special offers and competitions plus updates about NPG social media activities such as new accounts you might want to follow. Do let us know what you find most useful!

Social Media SoNYC

On Thursday, the eagerly awaited 9th SoNYC event took place, a super social media week special event at the American Museum of Natural History!  The topic for discussion was, “Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.“ The panel included:

– American Museum of Natural History educators who are developing a “tool kit” of mobile apps, websites and more to help middle school students collect, share and present data on urban biodiversity

– Ben Lillie, the co-organizer of The Story Collider, which tells science stories by combining verbal narratives with podcasts, Twitter and an online magazine

– Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

– Carl Zimmer, a science journalist whose latest book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, is based on feedback he received on his Discover Magazine blog when he asked the question: are scientists hiding tattoos of their science?

– Moderator: Jennifer Kingson, day assignment editor, Science Department, The New York Times

You can catch up on the discussion via the recording of the livestream or read our summary post which includes a Storify of the online conversations.

The next SoNYC takes place on Tuesday 20th March when we’ll be discussing “Keeping the research record straight” with Retraction Watch blogger, Ivan Oransky as well as John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity and Liz Williams, Executive Editor of the Journal of Cell Biology. If you’re in NYC and would like to attend, you can sign up here or watch our livestream if you can’t make it in person.

Guest posts and interviews 

To complement this month’s SoNYC event we ran a series of guest posts, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project. You can find our introductory post here, including a presentation by Christie Wilcox on Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet. 

To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gave us an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. His post considers how the effects of social media usage can be measured and what the future holds for such technology. Next we heard from Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider,who discussed the ways social media can also be used to tell a science story. Finally we interviewed Allie Wilkinson, creator of the “This is what a scientist looks like” initiative:

 “This is what a scientist looks like.” Developed by science writer and multimedia specialist Allie Wilkinson, the concept is simple, a Tumblr blog which collates pictures of scientists from all walks of life. Allie explains, “there is no cookie-cutter mold of what a scientist looks like. A scientist can look like you, or can look like me.”

The project aims to challenge the stereotypical view of a scientist, “there is no rule that scientists can’t be multidimensional and can’t have fun.

Continue to the post to find out how the project aims to challenge the stereotypical view of a scientist.

Social media 

To tie in with our social media extravaganza, our hub bloggers also joined the discussion. Tinker Ready, our Boston blogger, interviewed Joi Ito, Internet pioneer and head of the MIT Media Lab, on science, social networking and “the shape of ideas.”

In a conversation earlier this week, he offered a hypothetical example of how emerging tools are creating new ways to analyze information generated by online networks. Take data from the history of books, together with trends from search queries and Twitter and connect it all to scientific references, he said.

“Then we get these really rich data sets with which we can understand… the shape of ideas within the context of society.”

He also offered a very concrete example. This spring’s Research Update session – usually open only to the Media Lab’s corporate and philanthropic sponsors — will become a Tweet-up. For the first time, most of the previously private sessions will be live streamed and the lab will solicit input through Twitter.

“The more you get your ideas out there, the more likely you’ll find people to collaborate with,” Ito said.

Continue to Tinker’s post to hear more from Joi Ito.

Joanna Scott, our London blogger, interviewed Jack Ashby, Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, about QRator, the pioneering project the Grant Museum is working on to allow the public to engage with museum collections by contributing their own interpretations:

QRator is a project that allows our visitors to get involved in conversations about the way that museums like ours operate and the role of science in society today. In the Museum are ten iPads which each pose a broad question linked to a changing display of specimens. We are really interested in what our visitors think about some of the challenges that managing a natural history collection brings up, and other issues in the life sciences. They change periodically, but at the moment our current questions include “Is it ever acceptable for museums to lie?”, “Is domestication ethical?”, “Should human and animal remains be treated differently in museums like this?” and “What makes an animal British?”

Do you think social media is going to be very important to museums and outreach departments of universities in the future? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment thread. 

Nature Education Launches Interactive Biology Textbook

Nature Education, the educational division of Nature Publishing Group, announced this week the worldwide release of Principles of Biology, a $49 interactive university-level biology textbook:

Principles of Biology is a “born digital” textbook, with all materials designed specifically for consumption by students via browsers on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Each of the 196 modules in the text is a self-contained learning experience, integrating text, images, interactives, and continual assessment, which feeds an automatic gradebook through which instructors can track student progress. Instructors can customize Principles of Biology to meet their curriculum by rearranging modules, turning sections within modules on and off, adding their own material, and integrating the textbook into their campus learning management system. In addition to accessing all materials online, students can download a Desktop Edition for use when not connected to the internet as well as printable versions of each module.

Principles of Biology follows the successful launch by Nature Education in 2009 of Scitable, a collaborative online learning space for individual life science students now used in more than 180 countries. You can find out more about this in the official press release. 

Google + 

This week the Nature Blogs Google+  page reached the 1,000 circles milestone. Thanks to everyone who is circling us!

Don’t forget that you can find other NPG journals and products on Google+.  See our circle featuring all the NPG Google+ pages. This circle will be continuously updated as and when accounts are created.

 

The AAAS meeting in Vancouver

The AAAS annual meeting has been taking place in Vancouver since last Wednesday, comprising of a mix of plenary talks, smaller discussions and exhibits. You can read Paige Brown’s Storify summary of Saturday night’s “Science is not enough” plenary featuring Hans Rosling and discussing the challenges of science communication.

Some upcoming events in Cambridge, UK.

Two dates for your calendars if you’re in or around Cambridge, UK.  March 2nd is when the next #camscitweetup will take place in The Empress pub. A chance to meet others interested in science for an evening of relaxed chatting, everyone is welcome to join in.

April sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the evening of Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there’s another chance to reserve your place from 10am on February 29th.  If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser, Eva Amsen has to say about it.

 

February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – The Museum and the iPad: how the Grant Museum is using social media to make us all curators

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As part of Social Media Week, Nature London talked to Jack Ashby, Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, about QRator, the pioneering project the Grant Museum is working on to allow the public to engage with museum collections by contributing their own interpretations.Read on for more from Jack before Thursday, when you can tune into the live stream of “Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.” The panel, hosted by American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), is the latest in the monthly series organized by Science Online NYC, aka SONYC.


Hello Jack, welcome to the Nature London blog. Can you tell us about the QRator project you’ve introduced to the Grant Museum?

QRator is a project that allows our visitors to get involved in conversations about the way that museums like ours operate and the role of science in society today. In the Museum are ten iPads which each pose a broad question linked to a changing display of specimens. We are really interested in what our visitors think about some of the challenges that managing a natural history collection brings up, and other issues in the life sciences. They change periodically, but at the moment our current questions include “Is it ever acceptable for museums to lie?”, “Is domestication ethical?”, “Should human and animal remains be treated differently in museums like this?” and “What makes an animal British?”

Visitors can respond on the iPads themselves, on their own smart phones by scanning a QR code (hence the name QRator), via Twitter using #GrantQR, or at home on their computers at www.qrator.org. In these ways they can input into our decision making process. Their comments go live immediately on the iPads and online, without being moderated by museum staff.

Not only is QRator a way of empowering visitors but it’s also a research programme – it was developed with a team of academic partners here at the University – the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCL DH). Museums are only just beginning to use this kind of technology – it’s a truly ground-breaking project – and having developed the software specifically for us, our partners are researching the way that museum visitors behave around it.

What inspired you to try the iPads in the first place?

The Museum moved into our current venue last year from a small cramped lab down a back-alley in the UCL campus. It had an incredible atmosphere which, following our visitors’ wishes we didn’t want to lose as we moved into our beautiful larger space. At the same time we wanted to be a demonstrably 21stcentury museum, engaging visitors in the ways described above and being innovative with our practices. Working with CASA and UCL DH we decided on iPads as they are discrete enough not to detract from the incredible atmosphere we have here in the way that some computer interactives can, and they are intuitive to use. More importantly, museums had never used them before. To our knowledge, we were only the second museum in the world to employ iPads permanently in displays, and the first to use them for visitor participation.

 How are visitors engaging with them?

There’s been a great response from our visitors – they have left thousands of answers to the questions. One major thing that we didn’t anticipate is that people are also using them as a kind of digital visitors book. As well as getting involved in the conversations, people are letting us know their thoughts on the Museum in general and what they like or dislike about many of our specimens. The jar of moles gets a lot of mentions. This has become a great way for visitors to point things out to each other without us telling them what we think they should see.

Can people who can’t get to the Grant Museum at the moment participate at all?

Absolutely. Everything that is on the iPads is also on www.qrator.org– if you comment online it goes live on the iPad and vice versa.

Are you pleased with how it’s going?

Definitely. It was a big risk – we didn’t know if the hardware could stand up to this kind of use, and allowing visitors to comment without moderating beforehand is something museums very rarely do (though there is an expletives filter), but it’s been a real success. We’ve also had huge amount of interest from colleagues in other museums around the world wanting to know what we’ve learnt from it and whether they can create something similar for their visitors.

What are you hoping to do next with this project?

The big next step is to start putting our visitors’ responses into practice, and for the ones that are more broadly about the life sciences to disseminate what they’ve said more widely. We are constantly exploring what we can do next in this field – broadening the ways that people can respond.

Do you think social media is going to be very important to museums and outreach departments of universities in the future?

There’s no doubt it will be. It would be clichéd to say that more and more people are accessing information through these platforms, but it’s true. Museums are certainly upping their game, and the best examples are those that aren’t all about marketing. Building on the lessons we learnt with QRator at the Grant Museum, The Imperial War Museum is developing its new gallery with what they are calling “social interpretation” – it uses the social media model for visitors to participate digitally with the way their displays are interpreted. It’s a really interesting model and the time is now for museums to be experimenting with this kind of concept.

You can visit the Grant Museum and experience the QRator project for yourself at Rockefeller Building, 21 University Street, London WC1E 6DE. The Museum is open to the public free of charge Monday – Friday 1-5pm. Research and group visits are available by advance booking on weekdays 10am-1pm.

Will the iPhone revolutionize research?

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One of the first scientists to use an iPhone application as a research tool thinks ‘apps’ could revolutionize psychological and social research.

Kathy Rastle, a cognitive psychologist at Royal Holloway University of London, is part of an international team that has adapted a classic behavioural psychology experiment so it can be downloaded as an app for the iPhone or iPad.

Apps offer access to a much wider audience than the typical pool of university undergraduates, and preliminary results suggest the data is as reliable as that from similar experiments under controlled laboratory conditions. Rastle adds that downloading an app is a much more attractive prospect for users than asking them to visit a website. “There’s something quite sexy about doing it on an iPhone,” she told Naturejobs.

The app, ‘Science XL: Test your word power’, presents users with a series of real and made-up words and tests how quickly and accurately the user can spot fake words. It was launched at the beginning of February and within the first few days had been downloaded and completed by around 500 people, thanks in part to Royal Holloway students promoting it on Facebook.

Rastle expects the number of people participating to increase further now that the app has started to attract greater attention, and says the method could be applied to a wide range of research. “Using the iPhone or iPad to conduct scientific research is a revolutionary new concept,” she says. “The possibilities are endless.”

The app is free to download from the iTunes app store – search for “Science XL”.

What do you think about using an app as a research tool? Do you have any suggestions for experiments that would work well as an app? Share your views in the comment box.