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Improving the efficacy of web-based educational outreach in ecology

10/30/2014

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There is a growing movement towards using the web for educational outreach in the sciences. The unfortunate truth is that no one really knows whether or not it is working.

We have a new paper out this week  in the journal Ecosphere, the open access journal of the Ecological Society of America. I have contributed a guest post to their blog Ecotone, describing what we have done in greater detail. 

If you want to go straight to the source, you can access the paper from ESA here: 

Goldsmith, G.R., A.D. Fulton, C.D. Witherill, & J.F. Espeleta. 2014. Improving the efficacy of web-based educational outreach in ecology. Ecosphere 5: 131.

The core data underlying the paper is published in the Dryad Digital Data Repository, which is also open access and can be accessed here: Goldsmith, G.R., A.D. Fulton, C.D. Witherill, & J.F. Espeleta. 2014. Data from: Improving the efficacy of web-based educational outreach in ecology. Dryad Digital Data Repository.


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Before the Kardashian Index

10/16/2014

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Science recently published a letter I wrote to the editor regarding an article on social media as a means of outreach. For those interested in the origins of this unusual happening, please see Neil Hall's paper describing the Kardashian Index in the journal Genome Biology. Irrespective of what you think of this debate, my letter is an attempt to ask two simple questions about the scientific community's use of social media for public engagement: 


1) Does it work? 
2) If so, could we be using it more effectively? 


Answering these questions objectively requires data. My recent collaboration with Drew Fulton, Colin Witherill and Javier Espeleta exploring the efficacy of Twitter and Facebook in driving visitors to our website Canopy in the Clouds revealed to me that, for the most part, we have no data. Let's raise the bar...


**Original post on 17 October, edited with additional information on the 21st and 29th of October.



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