7th National Science Communication Student Conference
The programme for April 22, 2016
You are welcome at Sonnenborgh Observatory and Museum from 11:00 onward.
11:15 Ignite presentations
12:00 Main lecture: Bram Bregman
12:45 Lunch
13:45 Workshops round 1
15:00 Workshops round 2
16:00 Closing Lecture: Ionica Smeets
17:00 - 18:00 Borrel and Networking time
The programme in more detail
11:15 - 12:00 We would like to invite some of you to help us out with the first challenge of the day, which will be a round of Ignite presentations, involving every university attending the conference. In an Ignite presentation, presenters get a maximum of 20 slides which automatically advance every 15 seconds (it is important that the slideshow is already in autoplay to facilitate the flow of the presentation. For an explanation on how to enable these settings in PowerPoint, check this link).
The presentation should highlight the unique selling points of your Master's programme in Science Communication and also show how your University relates to the topic of this year's conference: the grand challenges (connected to the sustainable development goals of the UN). These challenges / goals are going to be picked from the list present on the sustainable development goals website from the UN.
In order to provide you with an example, we are letting you know which one we picked for our course / our university: quality education. The challenge here is to develop quality education in order to support democratic societies. We emailed you an example of what could be our Ignite slideshow, and as you can see, the content of the presentation is slightly variable and fully depends on your approach to the subject. However, we encourage you to keep it loose and entertaining, we had a lot of fun preparing this one! We hope you find this helpful and look forward to hearing from you all. Ideally it would be great if every university would choose a different goal to tie to their MSc track / programme.
Please let us know (please send a brief e-mail message to n.tamis@students.uu.nl) before the 1st of April 2016 what UN goal you’ve chosen to tie in with your MSc Sci Com programme.
12:00 - 12:45 Main lecture: Bram Bregman
12:45- 13:45 Lunch
13:45 - 15:00 Workshops round 1
15:00 - 16:00 Workshops round 2
Later in the day, one of the main features of this year's conference arrives: the two rounds of workshops that will take place after lunch. Here you have some details that will provide you with a deeper insight on the content of the workshops. The scheduling of the workshops isn't ready yet, and there is still one workshop to be confirmed, so stay tuned to catch the last updates but start thinking about which ones you'd like to do!
Oration Ionica Smeets: A couple of weeks after the conference, Ionica will give her oration and become a professor at Leiden University. She will use this workshop to test part of her oration on communication students. Join the workshop and be ready to be amazed and critical! (pay attention: she will speak in Dutch).
How to write a popular scientific book? Han Geluk and Matthijs Oude Lohuis met during their Bachelor's in Psychobiology at the UvA. During their Master's in Neuroscience they decided to write a popular scientific book on the brain. They contacted a publisher and... their manuscript was accepted! Find out all you want to know about getting your scientific book for the masses published during this workshop.
Creative scientific solutions: Climate change is real, but how is the communication about this topic done? Via the newspaper, advertisements or does it work better when Leonardo DiCaprio speaks about it during the Oscars? During this workshop you will work in teams to invent creative solutions on how and to what audience climate change should be communicated. This is led by PhD students Carolien van der Weijst and Robin van der Ploeg from Geosciences.
Sonnenborgh: When having a Conference at the Sonnenborgh museum a workshop on this educational institution should not be missed! Luckily for us the organization is offering a workshop led by Karin Heesakkers who works on bringing children in lower education in contact with astronomy. In this workshop you will learn more about their history, the way they deal with inquiry based education and will also participate in an exercise!
Forming a communication strategy: As a researcher you want to get your message across. But what happens when this doesn’t work as planned? Well, this is where the communication specialist enters the field! It is our job to clearly describe the problem and come up with a good strategy. Try for yourself in this workshop led by professor of microbiology Han Wosten.
Myth Debunking: what do you do when someone denies at a party that climate change is happening or your big sister says she's not going to vaccinate her children? In this workshop you will explore how you and your "science communication" study can contribute to all kinds of discussions about science in your daily life, on forums, Facebook pages or face to face.
16:00 - 17:00 Closing lecture: Ionica Smeets
17:00 - 18:00 Borrel