I had an amazing and unexpected day.. Last night i wrote  about the very cool talk that Diane and I attended given by Alan Alda.. He was up here talking about how to help scientists communicate with the public. Last night we learned that there was also going to be an all day workshop today on communications. .. by lucky chance, one of the workshop coordinators managed to find me a place..

 

It turned out to be a wonderful experience .. About 40 of us .. mostly faculty members.. spent the day working on improv skills and story telling skills as aids to communicating our work.

 

We began by taking the abstract from a paper from my friend alan’s work on climate modelign and trying to rework it into non geek  speak.. We had a ton of fun with that .. They  even invited three non scientific passersby in to the room to test our messaging.. Charlie tried the messaging out on them.. great illustration of how hard it can be ..  very cool !

 

Then we broke into two groups .. Our group of 20 did some amazing things including physical improv like the ‘mirror game’ .. where we tried to mimic our partners moves.. then reverse who was leading and who was following so many times that we forgot who was who..   One of my favorites was an exercise where we took a blank piece of paper.. and used it as a prop to describe  to our course-mates a favorite  picture .. as if we were all seeing it.. It was fun and powerful.. and believe it or not.. very applicable to the kind of communications i need to do all the time in and outside of my work. It really impressed me that Mr. Alda was just one of the 20.. no special talk or treatment.. just very human (likes tennis) and there to have fun  like the rest of us.

The most useful session for me was in the afternoon where we worked with the group to tune our ‘elevator speech’ . ie. who are we and what are we about It was very powerful hearing from others in the class.. Some just nailed it.. some couldn’t get it all out, others didn’t know what they were tying to say. I would put myself in that last category.. the group compassionately ripped my spiel on play apart .. and then helped me put it back to gather.. Some great lessons in there.. (too much in my head,   trying to get too much stuff across in too little time,   like hitting ‘play ‘ on a recording.. what did i mean exactly by ‘play’.. got some better examples ? .Start with a story, . all the stuff that i’ve wrestled with on this message.. .. .

My favorite story was by a prof from Johnson state that just said conversationally that he liked  getting his students fired up with lab experiments.. .. simple and sweet and very compelling.

It was a memorable day.. I left with much to think about .. and many tools that I can apply both to my work and to my outreach..

i felt so lucky to be there today !!! Thanks to UVM, Mr Alda and Stoneybrook  U for making this happen !

note all, nite sam

-me

 

ps. Chai had her ey operated on today.. and she’s doing great. looking very regal in her fancy collar ..