This post is to let readers know about a contest to find the best video abstract describing marine research. The Ocean 180 Video Challenge, which is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is looking to enhance the communication skills of ocean scientists and to provide educational opportunities for students.
Contestants will submit a 3-minute video that summarizes recent, peer-reviewed research (published between January 1, 2010 – December 11, 2015). The video abstract should highlight the relevance, meaning, and implications of the research to persons outside their discipline.
Videos will be screened initially by a panel of scientists and communication experts, but the winners will be selected by 6th-8th graders from all over the globe. Ocean 180 expects that over 50,000 student judges will participate in this year’s Challenge. The top three video abstracts will receive cash prizes of $3,000 for first place, $2,000 for second place and $1,000 for third place.
The program is accepting entries until December 11, 2015 (11:59 pm PST). All entries must be submitted online at www.ocean180.org
Here is one of the winning videos from a previous Ocean 180 Challenge:
Ocean 180 has some tips for making a winning entry. If you need more help making your video abstract, check out my tutorials.
This past week I taught a one-day workshop (Beginning Videography for Science Professionals) at the biennial conference of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation in Portland, Oregon. I got a lot of great feedback from workshop participants who spent the day learning how to plan, shoot, and edit a video to deliver a science message. Each participant worked on an individual video project as we went through the practice exercises. At the end of the day, we watched everyone’s “rough cuts”, although some were not that “rough”. I had a wonderful time seeing participants get excited about the possibilities of using video in their research and outreach activities. Also, I’ve already been approached by CERF organizers to teach the workshop again.
Video is a fantastic way to augment class lectures and let students see examples of habitats, organisms, and various physical/chemical/biological phenomena. Instead of just listening to a lecture about mangrove forests, students can go on a virtual field trip by watching a video. Quite a few educators are now using videos routinely to illustrate scientific concepts. The number of videos suitable to accompany science lectures is growing (here is a great list of videos for teaching ecology). Many of these are produced by professional filmmakers, but some are created by science practitioners and students.
Ecologists who work in different types of ecosystems and study various processes can make an important contribution to science education by making short documentaries (three to five minutes) focused on a particular topic. You may be doing research in an alpine forest, a grassland, or a coral reef. Or, you may teach a field course in a tropical rainforest or a desert. By shooting some footage and putting it together with a brief explanation, you can provide a unique insight into that ecosystem. If you get into the habit of creating short videos during such excursions, you will eventually build up a library of footage to augment class lectures. Students who take field courses or who are conducting field research can also produce informative videos in which they share their experiences and insights with other students or the general public.
I recently visited a unique ecosystem in southern Japan and decided to make a short video about it. I spent about two hours at the site shooting footage with my iPhone (attached to a monopod). I would have spent that much time anyway taking photos and just exploring the site. I additionally spent about five hours over the subsequent three days editing the clips (with iMovie) and incorporating information from the literature. Whenever I had a few minutes during my travels (waiting for a plane or bus), I trimmed the footage or searched the internet for information to include in the video. I did most of the initial editing on my iPhone, but finished the video on my computer using the desktop version of iMovie.
The resultant 4.5-minute video would be suitable to show in a lecture about climate controls on plant distributions or a more specialized lecture about mangrove ecosystems.
Now, some of you may be hesitant to make such a video, thinking that it will take a lot of time or will never be as good as professional science documentaries. Well, your videos don’t have to be of BBC quality to be effective. Also, you don’t need fancy equipment or a film studio to produce an informative and high-quality video. I used an iPhone 6 to film this video, which was rendered in high definition (1080p). As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the iPhone is easy to use to capture video, especially if you know a few basics. Movie-editing is also quite easy with applications such as iMovie. Video-sharing sites allow creators to easily upload their videos online where they are readily shared with others.
The main point here is that with a little effort, I was able to create a mini-documentary about a topic of interest to students and researchers studying mangrove forests. Students may read about the distributional limits of mangroves, but text descriptions are dry and often not very interesting. A video, on the other hand, takes the viewer across oceans to a remote site they will likely never have the opportunity to visit and creates a memorable example of mangroves growing near their northernmost limit. The video is also understandable by non-specialists who might travel to southern Japan and want more information about unique coastal vegetation found there.
“If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.” That was a favorite saying of Deng Xiaoping, who was referring to China’s economic reform that would ultimately transform the country. China’s decision to open its doors to foreign investment and western knowledge also let in the Internet and foreign ideologies. To keep those “flies” away, the Chinese government has implemented The Great Firewall of China—an Internet censorship and surveillance program.
I’m currently in China where access to social media (Twitter, Facebook), YouTube, Google, and many other sites is blocked. A number of media sites such as CNN and the New York Times are also blocked (you can test whether a website is blocked by using https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedinchina/Update 5/25/16: if previous site is unavailable, try this one https://www.vpnmentor.com/test-the-great-china-firewall/). Not only that, the government surveillance encourages self censorship because Internet users believe they are being watched and could potentially suffer legal and economic consequences if they do not adhere to the government policy. The blockage of sites I take for granted at home means I cannot (easily) get to my g-mail, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. In addition to the inconvenience, such censorship is quite disturbing to someone accustomed to Western freedoms and beliefs.
The irony is that it’s possible to jump over the Great Firewall, and many people here do. How that’s accomplished requires an understanding of how the Great Firewall works, which is technically quite interesting. There are three main ways Internet access to certain sites is blocked. The first is IP Blocking, which works by blocking all access to a known IP address. For example, www.facebook.com (a domain) maps to a known IP address; any attempt at connection is immediately disconnected (I would get messages saying that the server was unavailable, or the connection attempt would time out). The second way is called IP Address Misdirection, which does exactly what the name suggests. You might type in a url, www.lsu.edu, but the Firewall will send you to a fake address, www.misdirected.lsu.clone.edu. The final method is called Data Filtering, in which an Internet search involving certain keywords (e.g., Tiananmen Square) will be intercepted and the content of the resulting URLs examined. If the URL is on the censored list, then access to that site is blocked.
Through the use of VPNs (virtual private networks) and other proxies, Chinese citizens and visitors like me can circumvent the firewall. These work by routing information through a server located elsewhere, for example, California. Your IP address is thus changed so that it appears you are located in the US, and your web activity is also encrypted. This change bypasses the various blocking procedures described above. However, Chinese authorities have begun identifying and blocking some of the more popular VPNs, making it a bit more difficult for the average person to jump the firewall. I found one that is currently working and is allowing me to (so far) post things on banned sites such as Twitter.
I knew about the firewall prior to this trip (having visited China before) and had assumed that Chinese viewers were unable to see my YouTube videos. Chinese colleagues also had mentioned to me that YouTube was not accessible in China. I now know that is not entirely true. In fact, a friend who is from China but lives in the US said that her friends back home told her about “The Scientist Videographer” and video tutorials. They were talking about using a GoPro to capture video, and her friends mentioned a tutorial showing how to shoot and edit a slow-motion video, which showed a hummingbird. After a moment’s confusion, she realized they were talking about someone she knew—me and my YouTube tutorials.
There is much, much more to this topic (see this NY Times article for an in-depth description) than I could cover in a brief post.
Image Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0, uploaded by Brandmeister
Imagine you are a scientist who has been asked to describe your research at a press conference to a gathering of journalists and the lay public. You are expected to explain not only what your research is about but why it is important and why the public should care about your findings. The press conference organizers are expecting you to present information that resonates with a lay audience. The idea is to minimize any use of data and tell a story that conveys the relevance of your work to society or perhaps what motivated you to conduct the research. And….you have only three minutes to get your message across.
The question is: Can you unlearn years of scientific training and be a more engaging communicator?
That was the challenge facing me and other participants at a science communication “boot camp” held at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. These boot camps are week-long events in which science professionals participate in various exercises designed to improve communication skills. During that week, we participated in improv exercises, a realistic TV interview, and preparation of the three-minute talk described above (view the full agenda here). The latter two exercises were critiqued and also filmed so that participants could later review their performances.
Our three-minute talks were developed during a series of exercises in which we gradually built and then honed our stories into (hopefully) effective and memorable talks. For some of us more accustomed to giving technical talks to colleagues, this exercise was difficult. We were pushed way outside our comfort zones. I was impressed, however, with how well all the speakers incorporated what they had learned during the workshop to produce creative and interesting presentations.
I decided to take the recording of my press-conference presentation and, with a bit of editing, produce a brief video for distribution on one of my websites devoted to the topic of wetlands—my area of interest. I used iMovie to trim the footage, to create cutaways (to photos illustrating some of the things I mentioned in the talk), to add text titles, and to change up the perspective a bit to make the video more visually interesting. If you are interested in learning more about movie-editing, check out my Tutorials.
The press conference was, of course, imaginary. Our audience was composed of workshop participants and organizers who played the role of journalists and who asked questions about what we presented. As you will see, I went a few seconds over my three-minute limit, but managed to get across my message:
What everyone discovered in this exercise is that it is difficult to “wing it” when trying to deliver a scientific message to an audience completely unfamiliar with the topic. What works for an audience of your peers will not work for a lay audience—or even an audience of scientists trained in other disciplines.
To be successful requires (1) an ability to distill your message so that it is clear and concise, (2) an understanding of what your audience needs in the way of information and emotional connection to the topic, and (3) some skill at storytelling. Giving professional talks at conferences to your colleagues will not really prepare you. A week-long course focused on science communication won’t do it either—although you learn a few things and get some preliminary experience. Like any skill, it takes practice to become comfortable explaining your work to the average person on the street.
Most science students receive little or no training in communication techniques and mainly learn how to talk to technical audiences. That is how I was trained. However, scientists are increasingly asked to speak to the media, to policy-makers, and to the general public about their research. Not everyone is cut out to be a science communicator, of course, but we can certainly improve our communication skills so that we can interact more effectively with lay audiences when the need arises.
Academic institutions are recognizing the importance of science communication skills and are developing curricula to meet this growing need (e.g., Communication across the Curriculum, Louisiana State University). Several science societies are also offering workshops at annual meetings that focus on improving communication skills by members (e.g., AGU). Some institutions have special centers, like the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which offer intensive summer courses or workshops for anyone interested in acquiring new communication skills.
If you have the opportunity to take a science communication workshop or course, you should consider it, especially if you are a student or early-career scientist. Acquiring these skills early will benefit your career in the long-run. Also, you might discover that learning to distill your message, to consider your audience’s needs, and to use storytelling techniques can have beneficial feedback effects on your scientific writing and presenting.
