Enthusiastic communicators of science
On 9 March 2009, 68 participants gathered at Voksenåsen kultur og konferansehotell to participate in the workshop on Communicating Scientific Research. In total, the organisers received 232 applications for seats in the workshop from PhD students and postdoctoral fellows across science and technology programs at Norwegian universities.
Are Magnus Bruaset opening the workshop
The aim of the workshop was to help the participants unleash their potentials as communicators of scientific content through a combination of lectures and hands-on training. The workshop included plenary lectures and training through helpful critique sessions in groups. The lectures included critical examination of excerpts from actual research documents and analyses of recorded presentations given by outstanding speakers, and the techniques presented in the lectures were reinforced in the critique sessions. The workshop was made possible due to financial contributions from the industrial partners of Simula School of Research and Innovation.
The energy of the participants was an outstanding inspiration for the lecturers. All the participants were highly motivated and showed a great interest; not only during the workshop, but also before when submitting preparation assignments to the web-based learning platform set up especially for the workshop. In total, more than 400 documents consisting of presentation slides and research abstracts were submitted prior to the workshop and commented upon by the instructors. The lecturers Michael Alley and Melissa Marshall were impressed by the motivation of the participants, and commented that the submitted presentation slides were the best they have ever received for a workshop.
Participants from a variety of disciplines
Karl Erik Olsen’s research subject is within electrical engineering, and he works at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). “The lecturers knew their stuff, they were very well prepared, and they made the workshop a great success in my opinion. However, I think it is important also to recognise the collective effort of the attendees. Being from a great variety of disciplines the attendees made a complex group, which I felt brought a special angle to the workshop. I had to discuss my own and others work with people thinking in a completely different way than me, I found that especially motivating. A homogenous group tends to think in the same way”, says Olsen.
Olsen appreciates the opportunity to attend a workshop that focuses on communication of scientific research. “I sincerely hope that this workshop will be repeated regularly, also as a mixed group. The need for such a workshop is absolutely present as these communication skills are extremely important to researchers and scientists, but these skills are randomly trained during the Master/PhD-programs in Norway”, says Olsen.
Anne Chapuis (UMB) presenting her work on calving rate variations
of the Krone glacier at Svalbard in a critique session, while Hans
Christian Benestad (Simula) and Karl Erik Olsen (FFI) are preparing
for their peer reviews of her talk.
Realistic exercises and group sessions
It takes realistic training in order to master the presentation techniques that are taught in the workshop. In small groups put together with participants from different scientific fields, everyone attending the workshop could practice new techniques for presenting their research, and get valuable feedback from both experienced lecturers and fellow participants.
Nikolaus Oberprieler is studying cell signalling profiles in immune cells from healthy donors and cancer patients at The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo. He has presented his research several times before, both to his peers and to people with less detailed knowledge of the field. Oberprieler finds that the visual techniques taught by Alley is especially well suited for presenting to a general public, because they focus the key aspects of the research; concept, ideas and results. “I will definitely use the general approach when I am presenting in the future. The group sessions allows testing of new presenting techniques; the concept of blanking the screen is for example something I might do in the future, but would never have dared doing without testing it first on a smaller crowd”, says Oberprieler.
Networking
Allowing the participants to stay in one place for two nights gave an opportunity both to meet new people and to learn how many talented science researchers there are working in Norway. “During the course, getting in contact with PhD students from other universities in Norway was a great experience. Finding out that researchers from other disciplines are dealing with concepts and challenges that can be related to my topic is fascinating. In addition to the social value, I like the idea that maybe this can lead to interesting research collaboration between universities and research institutions, and could be even extended to industrial collaborations”, says Aiko Fallas-Yamashita, PhD student at the Simula School.
StatoilHydro and Telenor are owners of the Simula School, and both companies were generously contributing to the realisation of the communication workshop. Additional funding was also provided by The University of Oslo, IT Fornebu and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI).
Read more:
More information about the workshop on Simula highlights
