Workshops in:
- Media skills
- Science communication
- Presentation skills
For over 20 years, I’ve been communicating science in print, on radio and in talks. I must have read several thousand press releases, and watched scientists give presentations, and I’ve seen the good, the bad . . . and the downright unintelligible!
Drawing on that experience I’ve developed workshops and training programmes in basic media and communication skills that have proved very popular and successful with scientists, researchers and post-graduate students. I’m also a trainer with the new EU’s ESCoNet project, delivering media skills and communication training to researchers across the EU.
Communication is essential to science and research — whether communicating with one’s peers or colleagues in other disciplines, or to funding agencies and venture capitalists, or to schools and the public at large.
Good communication is a skill, and like all skills it can be learned. It’s also a valuable and useful skill, worth working at, as it can be applied not just in research, but for all kinds of purposes.
Clients in the past have included university researchers and post-docs, medical charities, research dissemination teams, and State agencies.
The intensive half-day introduction to media skills — focusing on writing a press release, and contacting media — has proved especially popular over the years.
If you need help with media skills, or would like some communication skills training, I’d be more than happy to work with you and develop a training programme or workshop for you. The workshops can be tailored to the individual or group, and to specific needs. You can contact me using the comment form below.
The Atlantic Corridor STEM Conference, which focuses on how science, technology, engineering and maths are taught in our schools and colleges, takes place in March with a keynote speaker of international quality. Dr Ben Goldacre M.D. is an author of the Guardian newspaper’s weekly column called Bad Science. His website http://www.badscience.net is devoted to satirical criticism of scientific inaccuracy, health scares, pseudoscience and quackery. It focuses especially on examples from the mass media, consumer product marketing, problems with the pharmaceutical industry and its relationship to medical journals as well as complementary and alternative medicine in Britain.
In its third year, the conference gives industry professionals such as teachers, lecturers and anyone connected to the education sector the opportunity to examine the quality in the way in which certain subjects are taught in our schools and colleges. It examines how young the children should be when introducing them to STEM subjects as well as methods used to teach. The conference examines alternatives to this and give educators an opportunity to help make a difference to the existing curriculum.
The conference will also host over 100 Transition Year students who will be challenged to give their honest views on the subjects. The students will then deliver the results to those attending the conference.
The conference takes place on March 10th 2011 in the Tullamore Court Hotel. To book your place at this event please visit http://www.eventelephant.com/atlanticconference2011
Other speakers at the conference include Sarah Baird from the Arizona Centre for STEM Education, Prof. Patrick Cunningham Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government, Dr. Thad Starner Founder and Director of the Contextual Computing Group in Georgia Tech and Paul Carroll from CPL.
The conference is sponsored by Ericsson, the world’s leading telecommunications company and running in parallel to the conference is a primary school science competition and a workshop for secondary school students focussing on their attitudes to science and technology.