Recent Presentations: Getting Your Science Online and Evaluating Information

As I mentioned way back on October 22nd, I was kindly invited to give a talk at the Brock University Physics Department as part of their seminar series. The talk was on Getting Your Science Online, a topic that I'm somewhat familiar with! Since it was coincidentally Open Access Week, I did kind of an A-Z of online science starting with the various open movements: access, data and notebooks. From there I did a quick tour of the whys and wherefores of blogs and Twitter.

There was a good turnout of faculty and grad students with lots of great questions and feedback, some more skeptical that others but definitely stimulating and, I hope, worthwhile.

Here are the slides:

Thanks again to Thad Haroun and the Brock Physics Department for inviting me!

And the other notable presentation was just yesterday, part of my intervention in a section of one of York's science-for-non-science-majors courses, Natural Science 1700 Computers, Information and Society. The prof, Dov Lungu, and I collaborated on a three-part Information Literacy section for the course. In my three one-hour sessions I covered some of the basics of surviving the information needs of university life and in the second part, a fairly typical library session on how to find resources for the class. The third part was a bit more interesting in that Dov gave me free reign to talk about evaluating information online, pretty well any way I wanted.

I wouldn't normally bother to share my course materials here on the blog, but I rather like the presentation I used and I thought it went over fairly well. The various ridiculous examples I used worked well to spark a bit of discussion in quite a large class.

As usual, I appreciate any feedback.

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