AGU Wrap-Up

Wow! What a great session. All of our speakers were wonderful and attendance was better than we could have dreamed. I wanted to let everyone know that just because AGU is over, it doesn't mean that pop-ups are over. Our speakers are writing up their talks and some will even provide slides. Keep an eye out for these guest posts and start thinking about what you would like to talk about next year!

We also wanted to thank those of you that filled out the surveys during the session. Your feedback is very helpful and we already are working on ways to make next year's pop-up sessions an even bigger success. Thank you for your support!

Girls Science Day

As graduate students, many of us are always seeking ways of getting involved with outreach opportunities, particularly ones that give us teaching experience (for those of us who are interested in pursuing careers in academia or teaching).  As a woman, I am also always looking for ways of getting young girls excited about science.  I think that it's important for girls to see that science can be fun and that there are people like them who are making a career of it.  Because of this, I was really excited when I heard about an annual event at Columbia called Girls Science Day.

Girls Science Day is an event run by graduate students at Columbia where over 100 middle school aged girls come to participate in hands-on experiments in a range of sciences.  Experiments range from extracting DNA from strawberries to learning how acoustic signals travel in water and are used for active source seismic imaging.  You can see a couple of examples of experiments that we have organized for this event on this blog!

While organizing this event for the last couple of years, the importance of incorporating hands-on learning into science education for young students has become very clear to me.  I hope that everyone will take advantage of the opportunity that we have during this AGU Student Pop-up session to try to learn about new and exciting ways of engaging the broader public, and particularly children.  Through science education and outreach, we are hopefully able to inspire kids, particularly kids who might grow up thinking that they will never be able to be a scientist because of their gender, race, or socioeconomic background, to get excited about all that a career in science has to offer.

While this is a pretty large-scale event to organize, it has been a wonderful opportunity to bring graduate students from a range of fields together.  Events like this can be the perfect forum to implement some of the ideas that we'll be learning about during the AGU session, Teaching and Career Challenges in the Geosciences.

Share your content - How and Why

Hello everyone! It's just over a week until we meet in San Francisco to have our session. We want to help you get your content out there and available. Here I'll quickly outline why you may want to do this and how we can help.

Why Share?

Initially it seems obvious to share your slides and content. Maybe someone in the audience didn't catch everything that you said, wants to review, or really admires a figure you made. Sometimes I hear academics say that they are scared to share their content though. Common comments are "someone will take it and present it as theirs," "I'll get scooped if I show my data," or "this breaks anonymous peer review." 

While this is a decision everyone has to make for themselves, I personally prefer to make anything that I present in a public setting fully available. I do this for several reasons:

1) Putting your work out there establishes a concrete date of record for you showing results. If someone tries to scoop your work, you can easily show your dated content. 

2) It encourages crowd source review and verification. If I present model results, then make the model easily available, it is likely that others will use/test drive the model. This helps find bugs and encourage improvement!

3) Funding agency compliance. Many funding agencies demand that work they fund (especially government funded) be in the public domain.

4) Good will. In the end, we are all here to try to solve geoscience problems. If you have made progress on the problem, why keep the solution private! 

While many of the comments above are directed at scientific research instead of education topics, they can be adapted to meet topics like open course-ware. 

How to Share

We hope that you will want to make the content of your presentations and any associated media available for everyone in the session! You can write a post on your blog, post content to GitHub or SlideShare, or share from cloud hosts like Dropbox. No matter how you do it, let us know. We'll build up a page with links to everyone's content. If you are interested in writing a blog, but don't know where to start, check out the AGU Bloggers Forum on Tuesday at 5 PM!

Until Next Week,

John Leeman