Blogging as a resource for science education

Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

Blogging as a resource for science education

Marie-Claire Shanahan

Online tools offer great potential for enriching science classrooms by bringing the processes and people of science to life. How can writers best target classroom audiences? How can educators leverage students’ knowledge and excitement about online tools? Marie-Claire Shanahan is a blogger and associate professor of science education at the University of Calgary, where she investigates the ways that people communicate science online and in classrooms. Here she examines some of the key advantages of digital communications tools that truly engage students, offering general guidance for writers and creators as well as specific advice on how to develop online writing spaces where students are the authors.

There is a long history of bringing science news into classrooms as a way to generate interest and show students the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Many generations of science students will recall assignments asking them to cut out newspaper articles for a classroom bulletin board. Surveys show that almost all science teachers incorporate science news into their curricula in some way.1 And students say they find science news interesting, motivating, and important.2 Online writing spaces offer educators, scientists, writers, and students of all ages new ways to interact with each other and with the scientific community. Blogs, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube can provide flexible spaces for deeper and more contextual coverage of science news, facilitate interactions with experts outside of the classroom, and allow students to communicate as experts themselves.

The particular reasons that students enjoy science news in the classroom point to ways that digital tools can make valuable educational contributions. Students report that they find the novelty of science news fascinating; they like to feel that their knowledge is up-to-date. These days, when making school relevant to students has become an important rallying call, some students even say that the most relevant and useful topics are those that they can talk about with friends and family, such as breaking news stories and cutting-edge findings.3 Online news sources, including blogs, have a terrific advantage in reporting and updating stories in almost real time. One good example was NASA’s 2010 arsenic-based life study. Reported first in a live-streamed press conference, the paper was discussed simultaneously on Twitter and quickly appeared on science blogs and in online science news venues.4 Students and teachers had access to the main research claims, and critiques, within moments of their being made public.

Students are attracted not just to the excitement of current science news; the form matters as well. One research team asked high school students to explain what they look for when they choose to read an article about science. They said they were more interested in pieces that were creative—that used metaphor, analogy, and poetic language to help explain concepts—than in ones written in a more formal, traditional journalistic tone.5 This is an important observation for bloggers and other online writers. Online venues for science writing, especially blogs, are noted for the wider freedom that they give writers both for covering topics that are of personal interest, and for covering them in nontraditional ways.6 There are fewer constraints in form and length, and online writers can use that to their advantage to draw in young readers. Randall Monroe, creator of xkcd comics, illustrates this well with his What If series (http://what-if-.xkcd.com), which uses informal language, humor, and absurd situations to explain complex science and math concepts.

Beyond generating interest, reading and understanding science news is one of the key skills associated with scientific literacy, especially when that literacy is taken to mean having more than just a basic understanding of scientific facts. Exposure to science news is very important for preparing students to be thoughtful decision makers on key socio-scientific issues such as climate change and biotechnology. And this is where conventional media, such as newspapers and television news, have typically come up short as a classroom resource: they tend to emphasize recent published findings and ignore the context of scientific discovery.7 This contextual information is an important element of science curricula and standards across most English-speaking school systems and is essential for helping students make sense of scientific controversies and challenges. But short newspaper articles or television clips rarely have room for specific contextual details, such as how new findings support and contradict previous work, how funding decisions were made, how the peer-review process progressed, or other background information that helps illustrate the importance of argument and disagreement in science.

Online communications about science can move beyond these constraints. As previously mentioned, online sources were directly responsible for the timely reporting of research results related to the possibility of arsenic-based bacteria. More importantly, online sources (in particular Twitter and various types of blogs) were responsible for quickly making criticisms of the research public. A rich collection of different critiques was quickly available to students and teachers, providing an opportunity not only to learn about the downfalls of this individual study but also to develop a greater understanding of the processes of science. Science writer Carl Zimmer, for example, did not just publish an online piece reporting on the criticisms; he also published on his blog direct emails from thirteen scientists examining the experimental methods and findings in detail. Microbiologist Rosie Redfield wrote candidly on her concerns about the study and drafted a letter to the editor of Science with the help of commenters on her blog.8 She also publicly documented how she attempted, and failed, to replicate some of the key experiments from the study.9 These writings have been a tremendous resource for classroom teachers and have given students a way to read critiques straight from the fingertips of scientists (exasperated language and personal feelings included), so they can start to understand the role of those kinds of critiques in scientific research. Both of these examples illustrate how online writing spaces can provide materials and voices not often found in conventional science news. These contextual materials can help students to understand better the people and processes of science.

Another key problem that teachers and students encounter in reading conventional science news, especially about controversial topics, is that the credibility of the news is difficult to assess. Researchers and educators have argued for many years over how well students can be expected to assess the credibility of claims. When reading science news, teens are hesitant to use their background knowledge of a topic to determine the veracity of what they are reading. They tend to trust written texts too readily.10 Others have noted that there are very few science news stories for which students, or anyone outside of the relevant field, can be expected to have the full background knowledge needed to assess the finer points of new research findings. For example, with the announcement of evidence for gravitational waves, many physicists had difficulty explaining, and even assessing, whether the complex findings represented a true breakthrough.11 Stephan Norris, a science education researcher, has suggested that students should instead be taught to assess the credibility of the expert, such as their standing in the scientific community, their prior publications, and their place in any developing consensus. This seems sensible to some degree, but it is only in online spaces that it is even possible. Blogs and online news media that provide detailed networks of linked material, such as researchers’ other work, their critics, and their own personal writing, are thus a potentially valuable resource for students learning to assess the credibility of scientific experts and the work they produce. This is more valuable than just access to a search engine because it helps to teach students where to look for this information and what types of sources are relevant and trustworthy—especially important skills when examining credibility as it relates to controversial or contentious scientific topics.

Online spaces as classroom places

Online spaces such as blogs can be used in many ways by students and teachers themselves. For example, Staycle Duplichan, a Louisiana high school teacher, runs a classroom blog with student-created content. She has outlined eleven different types of posts that her students write for her classroom blogs.12 These range from posts that start science book club discussions to those that share study tips among students.

She is not alone in the variety of writing and interaction tasks that she envisions for student blogs. Researchers followed nine classroom blogs created by middle and high school science teachers and written by their students. They noticed four formats that all of the blogs shared:

• scribe posts, where an individual student provides an account of the concepts addressed in class that day;

• resource-sharing posts, where many students contribute links to websites, simulations, videos, databases, and other resources relevant to the current class topics;

• opinion-solicitation posts, where the teacher asks each student to respond with his or her views on a controversial or contentious topic; and

• required responses, where the teacher or an invited guest writes a post and students are required to post comments in response.13

The idea of having students take turns acting as a scribe for the class is a particularly popular one among teachers. There is great value in students taking responsibility for communicating about what they learn, and it can be motivating to them to have an authentic and real audience for their writing, beyond their teacher.

There is also a strong connection between this type of blogging and the creation of explainer blog posts written by scientists and science writers. Joe Hanson, creator of the PBS video series It’s Okay to Be Smart, sometimes writes posts to accompany his videos. These explainer posts fill in details and expand on concepts explained in the video just as students’ scribe posts are meant to do.14 The explainer posts illustrate the importance of online science writing not only as a resource for helping students understand science, but also as a model of good writing for students improving their own writing skills.

When given the opportunity to be active science bloggers, students seem to act in many of the same ways as those who blog outside of classroom settings. As April Luehmann and Jeremiah Frink noticed with the scribe posts, students will often dive into their assigned topics to create comprehensive and deep explanations. In a classroom science blog observed by other researchers, students also took on the self-corrective tasks sometimes ascribed to communities of science bloggers.15 With their teacher, they created “the editor’s initiative,” whereby students earned credit for identifying errors and omissions in the daily scribe posts and for working with the authors, their peers, to correct the errors. This led to important discussions about writing standards and editorial practices in science.

Other online venues such as Twitter can also bring students in direct contact with scientists. A regular discussion using the hashtag #scistuchat is hosted on the platform by high school science teacher Adam Taylor. Every month, a new topic is presented and questions are posed to be answered by students and any scientists interested in participating. They are all encouraged to interact with each other directly and to share what they know and what they are curious about. In this space there is room to move beyond reporting on new findings to discuss the methods, connections, and contradictions that characterize the process of doing science. The hashtag is popular both among science teachers and among scientists, who are eager to share their passion for science with young students.

Science blogs and the classroom: Better together

One of the main reasons that blogs and other online venues are increasingly seen as powerful tools for the classroom, in particular for science education, is the way that they can connect students to experts and communities outside of the classroom. Blogs can open doors to scientific work where scientists, writers, students, and any other interested individual can interact.16 Blogs and other online venues provide the context behind science news, and their links allow students to assess the credibility of the scientists involved. Blogs also provide space for professional scientists to weigh in on their discoveries, as well as for discussions of scientific processes and the nature of science. There are opportunities for students to act as science writers and to learn from exemplars that they find online. Scientists, science writers, science educators, and students all benefit from the diversity of dynamic and richly interactive new platforms for sharing ideas online.

Marie-Claire Shanahan is an associate professor and research chair in science education and public engagement at the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. She is a blogger at Boundary Vision and has written for the Scientific American Blog Network, Story Collider Magazine, American Physical Society News, and Science and Children.

Marie-Claire is based in Calgary, Canada. Find her at her website, http://boundaryvision.com, or follow her on Twitter, @mcshanahan.

Notes

1. Melissa R. Kachan, Sandra M. Guilbert, and Gay L. Bisanz, “Do Teachers Ask Students to Read News in Secondary Science? Evidence from the Canadian Context,” Science Education 90, no. 3 (2006): 496—521.

2. Ruth Jarman and Billy McClune, Developing Scientific Literacy: Using News Media in the Classroom (New York: Open University Press, 2007).

3. Martina Nieswandt and Marie-Claire Shanahan, “’I Just Want the Credit!’—Perceived Instrumentality as the Main Characteristic of Boys’ Motivation in a Grade 11 Science Course,” Research in Science Education 38, no. 1 (2008): 3—29.

4. Olivier Dessibourg, “Arsenic-Based Bacteria Point to New Life Forms,” New Scientist, December 2, 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19805-arsenic based-bacteria-point-to-new-life-forms.html; Dennis Overbye, “Microbe Finds Arsenic Tasty; Redefines Life,” New York Times, December 2, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/science/03arsenic.html.

5. Krystallia Halkia and Dimitris Mantzouridis, “Students’ Views and Attitudes towards the Communication Code Used in Press Articles about Science,” International Journal of Science Education 27, no. 12 (2005): 1395—1411.

6. Marie-Claire Shanahan, “Science Blogs as Boundary Layers: Creating and Understanding New Writer and Reader Interactions through Science Blogging,” Journalism 12, no. 7 (2011): 903—919.

7. Billy McClune and Ruth Jarman, “Encouraging and Equipping Students to Engage Critically with Science in the News: What Can We Learn from the Literature?,” Studies in Science Education 48, no. 1 (2012): 1—49.

8. Rosie Redfield, “We’ve Received the #arseniclife Reviews from Science,” RRResearch (blog), March 16, 2012, http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2012/03/weve-received-arseniclife-reviews-from.html.

9. Rosie Redfield, “How to Test the Arsenic-DNA Claims,” RRResearch (blog), March 16, 2012, http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2011/05/how-to-test-arsenic-dna-claims.html.

10. Stein D. Kolstø, “Scientific Literacy for Citizenship: Tools for Dealing with the Science Dimension of Controversial Scioscientific Issues,” Science Education 85, no. 3 (2001): 291—310.

11. Phil Plait, “Cosmic News: Astronomers Find the Twisted Fingerprints of Inflation in the Background Glow of the Universe,” Slate, March 17, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/03/17/evidence_of_inflation_astronomers_detect_gravitational_waves_from_the_early.html.

12. Staycle C. Duplichan, “Using Web Logs in the Science Classroom,” Science Scope 33, no. 1 (2009): 33—37.

13. April Lynne Luehmann and Jeremiah Frink, “How Can Blogging Help Teachers Realize the Goals of Reform-Based Science Instruction? A Study of Nine Classroom Blogs,” Journal of Science Education and Technology 18, no. 3 (2009): 275—290.

14. Joe Hanson, “The Cycle: Carbon and Oxygen and You,” It’s Okay to Be Smart, http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/89005230922/this-post-is-an-explainer-to-go-along-with-this.

15. Robyn MacBride and April Lynn Luehmann, “Capitalizing on Emerging Technologies: A Case Study of Classroom Blogging,” School Science and Mathematics 108, no. 5 (2008): 173—183.

16. Marie-Claire Shanahan, “Science Blogs as Boundary Layers: Creating and Understanding New Writer and Reader Interactions through Science Blogging,” Journalism 12, no. 7 (2011): 903—919.