Team:Dalhousie/Human Practices
As we progress through our project collaborating with industry, community and academia, we have noticed just how important science communication is. Selling our story has been important for getting funding, initiating community support and presenting to groups at Dalhousie University who aren’t versed in synthetic biology. As we reflected on how important science communication is, we broadened our scope to Halifax’s recent measles outbreaks and saw just how much pain science miscommunication can cause. Our goal this year is to better understand the scope of scientific literacy within the general public through a survey asking ten short questions on how people read scientific media ( interested? Here’s the link). This information will allow us to draw some conclusions about people's reading and sharing habits online. This can then be used to interview science communicators, media outlets, scientists and members of the general public to get more fleshed out opinions on how science communication can improve, and how miscommunication can be spotted in the media. From this, we would like to create a webpage describing how to maneuver science communication and scientific media in the mainstream, with specific tips on how to spot fake articles. Our overarching goal is to discover ways science communication can progress to make science more accessible, and in the meantime create a document to help guide people through the maze of real science news and fake science news.
