Wisconsin Union Blend

I do a lot of dishes. And for whatever reason, I’m always looking for something to do while I’m doing dishes.

My latest strategy for bringing together soap suds and self-improvement is watching the stellar series of TED videos. TED, or Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is annual conference where leaders and thinkers share their innovative ideas in short, 18 minute talks.

I’ve been happy to find that many of these talks are about education, new approaches to presenting and communicating complex information, or about emerging technologies of interest to educators and instructional technologists.

I’m just getting started on the TED talks (there are currently over 200 talks on the site and available through iTunes), but I thought I’d share a few of the talks I found most relevant to my work as an instructional technologist:

• Johnny Lee shows us a smart board, and a couple other neat things, that he built from a $40 Wii Remote. That’s cool as it is, but what I found most impressive about his talk was his enthusiastic approach to sharing his research. He says, “To me what is most interesting about either of these two projects is how people found out about them … I’m just a researcher in my lab with a video camera, and within the first week a million people had seen this work … literally within days engineers, teachers, and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using this system or derivatives of this work.” Now that’s the Wisconsin Idea!
• Sir Ken Robins argues, convincingly, that common approaches to early education stifle creativity
• Amy Smith talks about several “basic tools with world-changing results“
• Hans Rosling shares an impressive approach to presenting statistics, and calls for making statistical data more readily available to the public.

Now if I could only finish the dishes in a single 18 minute talk!

Got a favorite TED talk? Or better yet, a favorite way to keep your mind busy while doing the dishes? Let us know in the comments!

I attended a Delta roundtable dinner recently and heard Professor Sharon Dunwoody from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication give a talk on “Framing Science.” She describes a frame as a narrative scaffolding — a necessary interpretive framework for making sense of information. She referenced an article in The Scientist in which the authors, Matthew C. Nisbet & UW-Madison’s Dietram A. Scheufele, talked about using framing to engage the public on the subject of science:

“[S]cientists must learn to focus on presenting, or “framing,” their messages in ways that connect with diverse audiences. This means remaining true to the underlying science, but drawing on research to tailor messages in ways that make them personally relevant and meaningful to different publics. For example, when scientists are speaking to a group of people who think about the world primarily in economic terms, they should emphasize the economic relevance of science - such as, in the case of embryonic stem cell research, pointing out that expanded government funding would make the United States, or a particular state, more economically competitive.”

Dunwoody offered some good strategies for framing:

• Have a sensitivity to the audience - To whom are you delivering the message?
• Have a strong narrative - Storytelling is a powerful way to frame your message
• Vividness - Bring a sense of excitement and energy to your message.
• Brevity - We’ve all listened to people drone on and on about their work. Don’t do this.
• Have a sensitivity to the audience - Yes, it is so important that it needed to be said twice.

Doug and I have talked about podcasting as a way for faculty and other instructional staff to extend their classrooms and share their teaching, research and stories with the rest of Wisconsin. As part of workshops that we’ve given on podcasting, we’ve talked about the importance of the Wisconsin Idea. The challenge that we’ve posed to instructors is to ask themselves why a person who is not a student in their class should care about what they are talking about in their course. What would make the average person choose to listen to their lectures, their thoughts, and stories? Why would people in the general public want to subscribe to their podcast?

To say that such an external audience is not a priority is just wrong. We’ve got a 100 year-old tradition at this University that says otherwise. To say that our work speaks for itself is equally misguided. We need to use the kinds of strategies that Dunwoody lists to frame our work and make it easier for people to understand.

And framing is not specific to science. We all need to work on how we craft our stories so that we can make them lively and accessible. It’s not just a marketing tool. It’s a way of telling citizens, especially of our State, that a necessary part of our work is explaining why what we do has an impact on their lives.