Sitting on the ferry back to Sweden after two weeks in Germany, I listened to a great podcast episode on the podcast Update Hochschule (in German) on the topic of social media. @frauforschung Lisa Niendorf, whose content on Instagram I’ve enjoyed A LOT lately (and other notable German Insta in the same niche, Prof. Dr. […]
I always like studies that use authentic data from out in the wild. I think it is so elegant to look at what is happening in real life rather than trying to generate data and then having people not respond leading to too small sample sizes, people misunderstanding the question (which might also have been […]
I have been thinking a lot about what platform to host our MOOC on and how that decision locks us into a lot of things, for example to certify completion of the course and with that requirements to use quizzes and peer-review, but also more generally the ways in which participants can interact, can navigate […]
Shreedhar et al. (2026) is a really important study on climate action and social media strategy: When you want to get people to do something (for example sign up for a talk), it’s much better to tell them to do it (“do not stand by idly!”) than to ask them for support, and it is […]
On Wednesday, Robert Kordts (awesome colleague and my co-teacher on the last Teaching for Sustainability academic development course) and myself tried a new-to-us format: A “Learning and Teaching in Higher Education” chat on Bluesky! The format is simple: We wrote a blog post (see here on their website, or read on below) and prepared six questions […]
I have complained a lot about how I miss the old Twitter that was such an important tool for me a decade ago, and most importantly during the pandemic, and how I have been looking for, and into several different, alternatives. And here is a paper that confirmed my impression that science Twitter has moved […]
I am still trying to read up on SoTL for a project I am working on, but keep getting side-tracked (but at least this time it is by a SoTL book. After a super quick detour from the book to an article it cites, on my favourite topic still, social media, that is…. :-D).
Today I fell into this really weird rabbit hole on intentions and self-completion. My interest was first sparked by an article by Gollwitzer et al. (2009) on “When intentions go public: Does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap?”, where they find that disclosing intentions, if the disclosure is noticed by other people, can make it […]
I found the book “The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.” by Hund (2023) in something I read recently, and somehow the title spoke to me. Despite having been a fan for a long time (and blogging quite a bit about research on, and practice of using, social media), I’ve been using […]
Social media has become a bit of a dumpster fire on most channels that I have been using, but even so I have a hard time letting go. I like the aspects of cultivating a big network, self-expression (btw, I wrote a blog post on some interesting research on that here) and professional branding. But […]
Ok, so I just published two blog post, last weekend and today, on how I have lost interest in social media. And then I came across an article on a “Social Media Entry Model” for teachers to enhance student learning outcomes, by Machado et al. (2024), and here I am again… Curious enough to read […]
I’ve been teaching about social media for academics in one way or another for a long time. I have recommended at least two books to read (links to my blogposts on “The Science of Communicating Science — The Ultimate Guide” by Craig Cormick, and “Communicating Climate Change” by A. K. Armstrong, M. E. Krasny, J. P. […]
For many people it has been (and still is!) a huge hassle to quickly figure out ways to teach field courses in a covid-19 world, and I can relate so much! But I’m also getting more and more excited about the possibilities that are opening up when we think about fieldwork in a new way. […]
It doesn’t feel like it, but today marks the 7-year-anniversary of my first blog post on my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”! To celebrate, I sent out this call to action (and please feel free to respond, no matter when you are reading this): Below, I am sharing the pictures that people sent me plus […]
My friend’s university recently decided that “excursion week” (a week in May during which there are no lectures or exercises or anything happening at university to make time for field courses during the semester) is cancelled this year. Which is, of course, not surprising given the current situation, but it isn’t cancelled as in “go […]
Social media is a great tool in science communication, so learning how to use it well is helpful not only for people who self-identify as science communicators, but also for scientists and scientists-to-be. Teaching social media science communication skills I’ve explained why I think that that is generally a good idea in our recent virtual […]
The hashtag #morethanweeds popped up in my Twitter timeline yesterday (thanks to @aturealexk). I didn’t think about it much because I was participating in #birdrace (shoutout to my awesome virtual team GEO-Tag der Natur where my colleagues and I jointly saw almost 100 different species of birds within a day) and was busy looking for […]
In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been tweeting so much about our recent Nature article: Yes, I am really this proud and need to tell the whole world about it! :-) Of course there are more other good reasons to discuss articles on Twitter, to do it yourself, and to publish in journals that […]
As my Twitter @meermini was quickly approaching 1k followers last week, I’ve been reflecting about who is following me and why. And on whether what I assume about my audience is influencing my tweeting behaviour. And I remembered an article I had read a while back by Coté and Darling (2018): “Scientists on Twitter: Preaching […]
Often completely underrated by people who start using twitter: The power of hashtags. In this post: Very brief intro and then the three main purposes for which I personally use hashtags. Hashtags: make your tweets easily findable Marking a keyword in a tweet with the #-sign turns it into a link which, if clicked, takes […]
(Werbung ohne Auftrag // This blogpost is not sponsored) I strongly believe that all scicomm efforts should be grounded in the science of science communication. That means reading a lot of original literature, or … reading this book that I recently found. It’s a quick and fun overview over the current understanding of what works […]
All throughout November, I’ve posted pretty much daily to my #WaveWatching Insta @fascinocean_kiel. And here are all the posts for you! If you prefer daily updates, why not follow my Instagram? But here we go with a month’s worth of wave watching pics. First: a wake reaching the beach. How do we know it’s a […]
Guest posts, take-overs and interviews are a great alternative to maintaining social media channels for every scientist / project / institution individually, if that isn’t what you want to be doing (or — as in my case — a great addition) As I am preparing a workshop on online science communication, I have been thinking […]
One of the 2018 achievements that I feel pretty proud of is developing a social media strategy for the science communication research project Kiel Science Outreach Campus, and implementing it together with the project’s 11 PhD students (plus a couple more colleagues who we “entrained” along the way). And the second article we wrote about the […]
Sometimes I feel like I have pressured all my friends into using social media for their science communication. Today I was talking to Kristin, who was apologetic about not having tweeted in a while and tried to excuse that by saying that she didn’t have anything interesting to tweet about right now because she is […]
Interesting year-in-review: despite amazing photo opportunities in Cyprus and Norway and other beautiful places, the Kiel fjord is clearly dominating my most successful Instagram posts of 2018 (only two are not from the Kiel fjord, one is from the Kiel Canal and another one from the Eckernförde bight, so still very close to home…). But […]
One of the 2018 achievements that I feel most proud of is developing a social media strategy for the science communication research project Kiel Science Outreach Campus, and implementing it together with the project’s 11 PhD students plus a couple more colleagues who we “entrained” along the way. And now an article we wrote about the […]
You might think that I’d be busy enough with my visiting fellowship at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Bergen this month, and you would be right. However, I’ve always* wanted to take over one of the rotating Twitter accounts (You know? Those accounts that tweet about certain topics, but are being run by […]
I recently gave an interview on my current pet project, #scicommchall. The interview was done by Anne Weißschädel, and published on THE German website on science communication research and practice, wissenschaftskommunikation.de. Quite an honor! I’m reprinting it here with permission: Frau Gleßmer, für die #SciCommChall stellen Sie jeden Monat eine neue Herausforderung an Forschende, die […]
Using technology to enable active engagement with content in a large lecture. In 2014, I presented the paper “Enabling backchannel communication between a lecturer and a large group” at the SEFI conference in Birmingham. That paper is based on work that I have done with two colleagues – the instructor of a large lecture, and the […]
— This post was written for “Teaching in the Academy” in Israel, where it was published in Hebrew! Link here. — Many times students fail to see the real-life relevance of what they are supposed to be learning at university. But there is an easy way to help them make the connection: Ask them to take […]
Remember my March #SciCommChall which resulted in me starting my scicomm Instagram account @fascinocean_kiel? Turns out that was a pretty successful move measured by metrics that I didn’t even think of before starting: After posting on that account for less than a month it had already gotten me an invitation for an interview on Susanne […]
Are you interested in learning how to design instruction? Then there is a MOOC that might be really interesting for you! The “MOOC MOOC: Instructional Design” started yesterday, and for three weeks presents readings to different topics which are then to be discussed on twitter as well as on participants’ personal blogs, facebooks, or other […]
This is a method that I have been excited about ever since learning about #birdclass in the “Evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching” MOOC last year: Help students discover that the content of your class is not restricted to your class, but actually occurs everywhere! All the time! In their own lives! The idea is that students take […]
