Science Online 2012 – Cachalot and Scientists with Stories

Are you interested in using the internet to communicate about your science, or science in general? If so, you should be thinking about getting involved with Science Online conference. While registration is closed now, there is an open wait list.

This will be my first Science Online conference, but I’ve spoken with several people about the experience and I’ve heard nothing but good things – really good things. And from reading what attendees wrote about the last conference, I think I’m going to walk away with a hogshead of new ideas on digital publishing and science communication, both formal and informal.

[photo size=’small’ align=’right’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/12/logo.png[/photo] What’s it all about? Here’s the description from the conference website:

Every January since 2007, the Research Triangle area of North Carolina has hosted scientists, students, educators, physicians, journalists, librarians, bloggers, programmers and others interested in the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done.

ScienceOnline2012 – #scio12 across social media – will take place January 19-21, 2012 on the campus of N.C. State University, with some 450 participants.

As in all the previous years, the meeting will be held in an ‘unconference’ style – the program is built beforehand with the help of participants on the planning wiki, and the sessions are designed to foster conversations and discussions among everyone in the room rather than a traditional one-before-many lecture approach.

The latest schedule is here, and the link with details on the Techno Blitzes is here. The techno blitzes are demos of projects and software. I’m especially interested in seeing the folks that are developing Annotum, an open source scholarly publication platform driven by the wordpress engine.

I’m also excited about the Techno Blitzes because we get to demo Cachalot! The link to our abstract for the blitz is included below. Kudos to Clare Fieseler as well for getting the Scientists with Stories projects onto the docket!

Cachalot: A Scalable, Open Access Digital Textbook for Marine Science

The Digital Sea Monsters Project at Duke University recently developed a digital textbook – called Cachalot – for courses focusing on Marine Megafauna. This textbook integrates the use of text-based, photo, video and audio teaching materials and delivers them to students in a freely downloadable application optimized for the Apple iPad. Cachalot represents a new form of digital textbook, one that is completely open access and populated with current content written by experts in the field. As a textbook, Cachalot sits at the intersection of transformative philosophy (e.g. it is open access and crowd-sourced), pedagogy (e.g. it provides for location independent and just-in-time learning that can fully exploit multimedia) and technology (exploits hand-held devices that integrate computational, communication and visualization capabilities). The app integrates open access journal articles, textbook-style content (including great photos and illustrations), video, audio and animations of animal behavior and anatomy within an annotation interface. Cachalot provides direct access to the experts that contribute to it, and the app incorporates a twitter-based messaging system for students to communicate about course materials. Much of the content in Cachalot is highly accessible to the general public, providing a novel way to educate people about marine science. This application has been developed as a framework, portable to other classes and other purposes.http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/cachalot