Communication
How we communicate our science and the broader relevance of it to students, friends and family, policy makers, and the media plays an important role in nearly all ecology related careers. This page is designed to help you find resources to improve your communication skills through workshops, outlets, online tools, and ideas/examples of effective communication.
Quick Links
COMMUNICATION TRAINING
Basic communication skills are important in every walk of life. Below is a set resources for useful training on basic communication training
- AAAS Communicating Science Workshop
- Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science
- Small Pond Science: Useful resources for science communication
- ComSciCon:Training for graduate students in science communication
- #SciFund Challenge: Online education curriculum designed to improve science communication.
FORMAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT/COMMUNICATION
Find formal media outlets to discuss and share your science. These are places you can contribute short articles or find some ideas of how to get started
Ideas and How-to’s on hosting a science blog:
Contributing to public radio (NPR “Science Friday” and CBC “Quirks and Quarks“)
- Media Relations departments/groups at home institutions
- The Conversation: A collaboration between scientists and journalists to maintain scientific rigor in news reporting. Accepting science stories daily.
- Upgoer text five text editor: Explain your science in the ten hundred most common words.
- Bootcamp communication training hosted by AIBS in Washington DC. A short multi-day workshop on honing your message to share with journalists and policy makers to make your science story resonate.
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT COMMUNICATION
Training resources for engaging the general public in science yourself
- Science festivals: Festivals held all around the world celebrating science.
- Reddit (AMA, AskSci)
- Nerd Nites: Casual atmosphere to share ideas about science (often in collaboration with museums etc.)
- Twitter (Biotweeps, Realscientists, etc.)
- Translating Science: Language Scientific provides high quality scientific, technical, and medical translation services to over 150 different languages.
- SciStarter: Citizen science network to post your research program to engage interested members of the public.