I have a new blog and website!

Hello there,

Long time, no post! I'm such a slacker. Well, I haven't been entirely delinquent; I've been working on a setting up a new website and blog at my new address, bridgetteclarkston.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to stay connected. See you over there!

Acclimating to the German landscape, in pictures.

On Wednesday, my first full day in Germany, Stephan and I visited the Paläontologisches Museum München at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. We came on a whim after hearing there is an archaeopteryx on display. The museum is cute and small and housed in the lobby and hallways a building, just like the Pacific Museum of the Earth in the EOAS building at UBC.

The museum is in the far right foreground, running behind it are houses on the Richard-Wagner Strasse. I like the pink house because it is modest and waves only a tiny flag to you as you walk past.

Behold the mighty skull of the Dreihornsaurier! A triceratops by any name is awesome to see. I think this one looks surprised. I would be too, if my body had turned into a puny pole.  

The skull of a Neanderthal. I used all my German skills to translate the label. This specimen earned $50,000 a year, was in a gang called the “Intelligenz” and one day hoped to see Anaheim. I wonder if they ever did...

Upon closer inspection, this is not archaeopteryx. Es ist eine Horndinosaurier, von Kanada.

In the end, we couldn’t see Archaeopteryx because it was in the shower or at a birthday party—the person spoke at lightening speed—but a nice consolation was getting the meet Fossil Of The Year 2013, the wooly mammoth.

What better way to follow-up the museum than with a sunny afternoon stroll along the Isar river in Munich. Even the trees need to hit the beach in this gorgeous weather.

Stephan waits in line with young and old alike to buy Radlers (a beer–lemonade concoction) from a curbside kiosk. As an uptight Canadian, I wasn’t thrilled to see these children drinking and cycling, but they assured me they can handle their liquor.

 

Berlin bound

I am sitting on the 7:50am IC train from Munich as it snakes its way north through Germany. I arrived three days ago for a holiday; Stephan came a couple weeks before to visit his friends and family. We’re off now to spend four days poking around Berlin, a brand-new city for me and one that Stephan hasn’t visited in six years.

I’m trading my nightly pen-and-paper journal for blog posts on this trip as a way to both share what we’re doing and alleviate my guilt from neglecting my stupid blog. Publishing a journal entry makes me anxious as I write this, but I think it’s a good experience if I’m serious about improving my writing.

We’re currently in the third hour of our six-hour trip and I have no idea where we are. I see more trees than expected, maples and pines and linden with its little fragrant flowers, and in all the ditches fireweed or, much more common, a tall plant I don’t recognize with pale yellow flowers. The landscape began wide and flat, mostly crop fields, pale green or yellow, dotted with buildings and small forests. The houses were almost all white-walled and unadorned, with red-tiled roofs. We’re now passing through steep, low hills covered in trees or the occasional field. Clusters of houses or a single large industrial building are in every seam or pocket of flat land between the hills and everything feels more closed-in and crowded. Not all of the houses are white here, some are mint green or yellow or light brown, many are gray or cream or beige.

Contrary to my normal vacations—my operating mode in general, really—I have not prepared at all for our stay in Berlin...or for this trip in general. Other than a vague notion that Berlin has many museums and distinct neighbourhoods I know next to nothing about the city. I am curious to visit what was East and West Berlin during the Cold War and see remnants of the Wall. And art. I want to stare at pictures on a wall and feel feelings. I’m ready to get me some culture; I hear there’s a lot more of that in Europe than Canada…though I’m skeptical that culture is ubiquitous judging by the number of fanny packs wandering the streets.

Where have the last three months gone?

Spring has arrived in Vancouver, and with it the last month of my break from full-time work (the reasons for the break I outlined in this post). Now seems an appropriate time to reflect how I spent my time in January, February and March. Did I achieve the goals I recklessly made public way back in January? Or turn my back on the world (and hygiene) and watch all of Battlestar Galactica in one sitting à la Portlandia? Or did I work full-time hours and just get paid less...which would really suck.

First, I have been working less, for the most part. I fell off the wagon with a full-time workweek once or twice, but overall, I work about 30 hours a week*. For me, this is a large change. Hooray!

*Sometimes I find it difficult to distinguish "work" from the rest of my life, like when I'm answering both work and personal emails before breakfast or "watching" a movie with Stephan while hunched over my laptop trying to get some writing done. I tend to be conservative and not count these times toward my work hours.

I'm slowly changing my bad work habit—and I consider chronic prioritizing of work over the rest of one's life a negative habit—because of two reasons: 1) I make a daily list of concrete goals for personal projects and scheduled time for them in my calendar, just as I would for work projects, and 2) I keep track in my calendar, roughly, of how I actually spent each day. To show what I mean, here's a typical example of my calendar this term:

A snapshot of my calendar. Blue = work, brown and red = personal projects or activities

I'm by no means perfect at tracking my days; I regularly forget items or sometimes entire days. January 27th is a mystery...maybe that was a Battlestar Galactica day...

Second, I have achieved many of the goals I set out in January. I needed to write that down because my mind tend to focus on what I fail to achieve, another bad habit that needs fixing. Ok, well, let's work on that now; here are my goals from January and the progress I've made:

First sweater!

1) Improve my knitting skills.

January: Complete at least the following: a wearable sweater (i.e., not ugly like my first sweater), one toque using a mosaic stitch, and one pair of top-down socks with a German heel.
April: I finished a sweater—a non-ugly sweater at that! I abandoned the mosaic toque because of ugliness (I'm an unabashed uglyist). I totally forgot about the German heel socks and knit two hedgehogs, snowflakes, leg warmers and a few other things instead.

2) Read more books.

January: Complete two books each month. This month’s books are Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne and Teaching What You Don’t Know by Therese Houston.
April: Why is reading so hard??? Sitting still makes my brain cry. If I didn't schedule time for reading, it wouldn't happen; I'm an impostor bookworm. There, that's my shameful secret. I did manage to read the two books above as well as Adventures In Solitude by Grant Lawrence, On Writing Well by William Zinsser, I Don't Like My Neck by Nora Ephron, How Learning Works by Susan Ambrose et al. and a collection of the works of S.J. Perelman. But oh, my god, sitting still long enough to ingest words through my mind-mouth is hard. 

3) Spend more time outdoors.
January: Twice a month I will do something more adventurous than my day-to-day walking, jogging and cycling around Vancouver. Can be anything from hiking, snowshoeing, snowboarding, day-long cycling trip, etc.
April: Adventures! I've been snowboarding SIX times thanks to my generous friends Mandy Banet and Kyle Demes, snowshoeing on Mt. Cypress and Mt. Washington, hiking on Galiano Island and I'm taking a Tai Chi class with Stephan. That last one might not sound adventurous, but it is. A stealth adventure.

Stephan and the slopes of Mt. Washington on Vancouver Island

4) Practice photography skills.
January:  I have listed 42 techniques from my favourite Scott Kelby photography book that I want to improve on and will specifically practice.
April: Ha! Not one done. Oh, I've taken pictures, and I'm particularly absorbed of late with my iPhone 4S camera and the wonderful world of Instagram and Flickr, but I haven't been as systematic as I wanted with my photography skills. Fail.

Instagram filters make everything pretty, including tiny dinosaurs

5) Increase my professional and personal presence online.
January: Make weekly blog post and e-portfolio.
April: Blog posts have been bi-weekly, but they exist, so I'm happy. E-portfolio is done too, hoo-frickin'-ray!

6) Become more involved in my community through volunteering.

January: Volunteer at least once for a cause related to science education outreach, a cause related to the environment, and a cause related to women’s rights. 

April: Total fail here. Well, almost. I did join two organizations and go to one orientation session but didn't like it enough to go back. I am volunteering with an elementary school on a science outreach project, but it isn't outside of my comfort zone and I wanted to gain new experiences with volunteering. I really need to improve on this goal. 

Wow, I'm doing better than I thought with these goals. Reflection really does help. Moving forward, for the rest of April I need be more systematic about improving my photography and I need to find some local cause that I am engaged enough with to stick-it-out past than the orientation. How about you, what are some of your goals and how do you keep yourself motivated? 

Women in pop culture, typography, and other random thoughts

I'm having one of those months where a hundred projects squawk for my attention like a nest of hungry chicks; I can't focus on any one thing for more than....

Hey, a blue car! No, wait, that's a puddle.

Anyway, this post can only be a brief round-up of what's flitted through my mind lately. I'm already getting antsy.

1) The misrepresentation of women in pop culture.
This is becoming more and more of an issue for me. When I started to pay attention to mainstream movies, TV shows, books, comics and video games, I was shocked that women are almost never the main character or even experiencing a story arc of their own. Instead, they are more often plot devices that progress a male character's story; for example, as a victim to be avenged or a reward to be won. Don't believe me? Try out this simple test, called the Bechdel Test, next time you watch a movie. It's depressing.
Video games, a huge part of my childhood, are some of the worst offenders at under-representing female characters, especially the mainstream franchises like Mario or The Legend of Zelda.

Poor Peach. Always the object, never the subject.  

If you're curious about this topic, I highly recommend the work of Anita Sarkeesian, her blog Feminist Frequency, and in particular her new video series called Tropes vs. Women. Anita's work was my springboard to authors like Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron and Ariel Levy—all of whom have opened my eyes to the importance of pop culture in shaping how we as a society treat men and women.

2) Typography.
Fonts have personalities of their own—some are formal, some are modern and energetic, some are universally hated (lookin' at you, Comic Sans). The font you use, the size, placement and alignment of type, all of this matters—a lot—because it influences the message received by your audience. Hilarious example of conveying the wrong message with poor typography? Here.
I am fascinated by the wonderful, beautiful ways typography is used. If you think type is cool too, you might like these resources:

• Typography articles on the design site creative bloq
• Two collections of artistic typography: Ina Saltz on pinterest page, Type Worship on tumblr .
• Myfonts: a huge repository of fonts and type resources.
• Identifont: for all your font identification needs. 

3) Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr or Facebook for photos?
So, where the heck is the best place to share photos? I'm swamped lately with all these photo-sharing apps on my phone that make it so easy to edit and upload pics to the web...but I don't want to have five different pages to maintain. And I'm not crazy about connecting a bunch of sites together; I just want a one-stop site to share pictures on. How do you share your photos?

Choked up about Crocus

Crocuses are beautiful, crocuses are fine.

I like crocuses; to me they are divine. 

I see the bursts of colour and I smile ear to ear: 

When the crocuses arrive, I know that spring will soon be here. 

*Sung to the tune of this Fred Penner classic. 
**Pictures from out backyard (except one with fallen leaves, that was Pacific Spirit Park)

Do you know how to read a book?

Until recently, I excluded popular non-fiction books from my personal reading. I'm not sure why. Somewhere along the line I lumped it all in with the worst of the"self-help" books—the "win friends in 10 easy steps", "learn Russian in your sleep", "blink and be thin" variety—giving non-fiction as a whole a whiff of desperation and self-delusion. Plus, if I'm surrounded by scientific papers at work all day, why bring other poorly-written, dry-as-toast non-fiction home to read? Or so I thought.

Then I met Stephan and his annoying habit of learning in his spare time. His bookshelf was mostly non-fiction and contained intriguing titles like Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink and Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen. I began to leaf through a few. Soon I was reading them in earnest. How did I miss all these great books for so long?

The most influential so far has been How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. When I picked this one up, I thought "this'll be a breeze, I'm already an ace at reading". Wrong; at least in part. For example, does this sound familiar to you:

"most people, even most good readers....start a book on page one and plow steadily through it, without even reading the table of contents."

Yup, that was me. A table of contents was a roadmap I used after I'd gotten lost in the book or wanted to skip to a specific chapter or topic. And page one? Of course I started on page one, it's the first page. I'm not an anarchist. So what's wrong with plowing through a book?

"...They [readers] are thus faced with the task of achieving a superficial knowledge of the book at the same time they are trying to understand it. That compounds the difficulty."

Crap, I thought, I do that too. I remembered recently reading a book about teaching that had a long story about playing chess, full of cognitive psychology jargon. I didn't see what the story had to do with teaching and I actually quit the book because it annoyed me so much.

Clearly I could learn a thing or two from HTRAB. So I read on. What I found was a clear, logical breakdown of what the authors consider to be the four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical and syntopical. The levels build upon each other: elementary is putting the words and sentences together, inspectional is skimming with a purpose, analytical is question-based reading for understanding an author's arguments and syntopical* is, well, hard. The level used depends on what you goal is—reading for entertainment, for factual information, or for conceptual understanding.

Inspectional and analytical reading were the most interesting to me. I won't go into too much detail today except to touch upon inspectional reading, or skimming systematically.

Before HTRAB, I thought skimming was something done in an aimless, haphazard way, like flipping to a random page or scanning for the pretty pictures. Turns out skimming, if done purposefully. can be a powerful way to get a sense of a book before diving into the details. Whatever amount of time you have—15 minutes, an hour—can be tailored to an effective inspectional read. No surprise, a great place to start is the table of contents. Also the index: which terms have lots of page references (therefore are most commonly used)? What kinds of examples are given? Do you recognize any specific people listed?

I used to think skimming was lazy, something you wouldn't do if you were serious about a book. Now, I skim every non-fiction book before I read it, even if only for a few minutes. I find it so helpful for understanding the general message and style of an author.

I think I'll write more about HTWAB in future posts. For now, I'll end with the greatest insight it gave me: I wasn't giving any thought to how I read a book. Sure, I used bits and pieces of inspectional and analytical reading here and there—sometimes I haphazardly skimmed, sometimes I took notes and tried to pay attention to every word—but I never reflected on why I used the technique I did, or when. In other words, there was nothing deliberate to how I read a book; I just read.

Now I am conscious of how I read. I might be giving a new book a 15-minute inspectional read to see if it's worth investing more time, I might be delving more deeply into a book that I want to learn from, taking notes and trying to understand the author's main points, or I might be reading for entertainment and just dive in at page one. Regardless, I think I'm finally getting better at reading all the non-fiction books Stephan brings home. Turns out they're not all about dieting.

Two of my favourite non-fiction books.

*One final note: The fourth level of reading, syntopical, is the Everest of reading. Not only is it a hard word to say—syntopical—it's hard to do. Read a bunch of things analytically while simultaneously comparing it to similar works, creating a synthesis of the field. In grad school this is what you're supposed to do, only no one shows you how. And now I find out there are instructions?! God dammit.

Seeking party-planning advice for Project Ace

------ This first part's a little sad -------

Ten years ago this September I was a 3rd-year undergrad student at the University of Victoria with two part-time jobs, one at the Bottle Depot counting pop cans and crushing glass, the other pouring coffee at the Blenz on Broughton St. One Tuesday afternoon I was an hour into a closing shift at Blenz (4-11pm) when my sister's roommate Cara popped in. I remember bright sunshine, a strong, slightly stale coffee smell and Cara telling me I had to call home immediately. When I did I found out my dad had been killed earlier that day in a helicopter crash.

Years later, I still feel the loss of my dad. Most days the pain sits as a dull ache that goes unnoticed but on occasion and without notice flairs up to be as raw, crippling and mentally-unbearable as on that first day. I know that you never truly stop grieving; how I feel likely strikes a chord if you've ever lost someone close to you. Until recently, though, I didn't realize that I now tend to think of Dad only in terms of what I've lost in my life rather than what I gained: pleasant thoughts now tinged with sadness, like happy memories viewed through a blue-tinted lens. A real bummer. I'd like to change this perspective.

------ sad part over -----

So I'm thinking, what better way to kick-off an attitude adjustment than to do something that celebrates Dad's life rather than mourns his death. The "something" is where I need advice.

What I'd like to do is throw a party in my hometown of Comox, B.C. on or around Aug. 28th, my dad's birthday. A reunion of sorts where friends, family, anyone who knew Dad from his various hobbies and community work  – R/C modelling, local politics, the Air Force Museum – can informally get together and catch-up with each other.  I'd like to hold it outdoors, maybe rent the picnic pavilion at Kin Beach or Air Force Beach so we could host a big bbq and hang out on the beach for the afternoon/evening. I really have no idea how many people would attend, but I'd like to advertise it as a community event rather than keep it by invitation only. Also, this wouldn't be a memorial, no sombre speeches or plaque dedications...a fun event, not a funeral.

In my head I'm calling this "Project Ace" because Dad was a pilot and his nickname was, I kid you not, "Ace". Right now Project Ace is stuck in planning limbo because a) I have no sense whether this is a good idea and little experience planning community-level events, and b) I'm terrified that no one would attend. I could really use some feedback on the following points:

Interest: Would you attend a party such as the one described above? Would you expect there to be concrete activities like, I don't know, games or speeches (even though I don't want speeches, would people expect one?). Do I need to worry about getting people to mingle? I could plan activities, I'm just not sure which would be fun. Do you have any other ideas for celebratory events?

Planning:  Have you ever organized community-wide event where you didn't know who might attend? How did you start planning for that? What are the major items to consider? I think I'd like to sell food and drinks, but people could bring their own as well.

How do you celebrate the lives of your loved ones? I'm way out of my comfort zone with this project; any advice or shared stories are a great help and much appreciated!

 Ace and his little red helicopter

A few things I wish I'd known in grad school

Working in the science education realm is teaching me some of the basics of how learning works. Frankly, I'm quite frustrated that learning about learning isn't part of our standard education, but that's not my point today. Knowing what I know now, when I reflect back on my life during grad school, I realize that many of the challenges I faced were caused by my own latent beliefs about learning and intelligence and their subsequent detrimental impact on my self-esteem. At the time I believed – and these are unexpressed beliefs, mind you, I had never really given it any conscious thought – my intelligence was (mostly) fixed, i.e., I was born with a certain amount of smarts and talent. I believed that if I struggled to master a skill (e.g., DNA sequencing) that others (my labmate Dan) performed with ease then, well, that meant I just wasn't as smart in that area. I believed that other people (whose names started with "Dr.") had to approve of and praise my work for it to have value. I also believed that most of my peers were driven by some mysterious internal passion that I just couldn't find in myself. Essentially, for six years I lived in a near-constant state of low-level anxiety, silently comparing myself to others and never measuring up, fearing at any moment I would be exposed as an impostor and shown the door.

What a depressing perspective! I say "nuts to that" and I hope you do too. If any of the above nonsense resonates with you, then perhaps you'll find the following helpful. I sure did!

1) Your intelligence is not fixed, but can change and grow with effort.
Oh sure, you may think this seems obvious when stated, but look deep down and I'm willing to bet you believe that the talent/"smarts"/"natural ability"/etc. you're born with determines your intelligence more than the active effort you make to learn. Turns out, your view on intelligence can have major downstream consequences on your confidence, your motivation, even your behaviour. Carol Dweck is an expert in this area and I recommend this Scientific American article as an introduction to the topic. How did this new knowledge affect me? To quote one of my favourite video game reviews, "this s**t blew my god damn mind". I now think of myself (and you) as life-long learners, whose mistakes are necessary and valuable parts of the learning process.

2) The more stable and sustaining kind of self-esteem comes from within, not without.
I used to feel pressured to answer emails right away because I worried people would be irritated or think less of my work ethic if I didn't. Why such silly behaviour? Because in this, and in a thousand other ways, I craved approval from other people. In fact, my self-worth at any given time was largely dictated by my latest interaction with coworkers, friends, family etc. I still crave approval, I don't think that ever stops, but it influences my self-worth less since I consciously changed my belief about intelligence and since I began taking steps to improve my 'core' self-esteem – the conviction that you deserve to be valued by yourself and others regardless of your achievements. My biggest influence in terms of self-esteem has been the book "Revolution from Within" by Gloria Steinem. If any of what I wrote above resonates with you, I recommend checking out the book or just exploring the topic more, no matter how much the term "self-esteem" makes you want to roll your eyes. Heck, just paying attention throughout your day to why you do things can be illuminating.

In fact, that's a good note to end on: self-reflection. When it comes to learning, the ability to monitor your own progress and adjust your behaviour as needed, essentially to self-reflect, is a vital yet often underemphasized skill. Until recently, it never occurred to me to reflect on or question my beliefs about intelligence. Once I did, it became clear that not only were my beliefs just plain wrong, they were making it harder for me to learn and hurting my self-esteem. The minor adjustments I've made have had a huge positive influence thus far. So, what do you believe?

This Is What A Scientist Looks Like – and it's me!

This Is What A Scientist Looks Like is a fun and clever blog who's goal is to challenge the public's stereotypical perceptions about scientists by posting submitted photos of real-life scientists doing everyday (but often hilarious) things.

I submitted a photo months and months ago (over a year ago, I think), promptly forgot all about it and just by chance stumbled upon the page today. Looks like I made the cut! Yes! *fist pump*

All thanks to you, Lego costume. You were totally worth the effort of destroying the vacuum's box and stealing bowls from the UNB biology graduate students to make.

Way Cool Presentations

Back in November I gave a talk about the awesomeness of seaweeds at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC. When asked to give the talk, I was both excited and scared because, even though I'd studied seaweed biodiversity during my PhD and love giving talks, I'd never presented such a broad topic (seaweed biodiversity) to such a broad audience (children and adults, biologists and non-biologists). You can view my talk here (and check out my frizzy hair) as well as see the slides below.

Science communication is often on my mind, especially when I'm trapped in yet another excruciatingly boring/convoluted/confusing academic seminar. In my experience, poor story-telling and bad presentation is a systemic problem in the scientific community,our passive acceptance of which I find continually frustrating and perplexing. If we cannot effectively communicate amongst ourselves, how can we hope to inform the public? While I do think a shift has begun and more effort is being made to develop communication skills in scientists, particularly graduate students, the shift is slow and mostly aimed at giving better conference talks.

With this in mind, I took my seaweeds talk as an opportunity to improve my own communication skills.  Specifically, to improve my design and delivery of a presentation. I was helped greatly in this endeavour by my partner, Stephan, who studies design as a hobby and without whom I would still be ignorant of all the things I don't know about design. Of Stephan's many presentation design books, I found two in particular to be extremely helpful: Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. I won't go into their details here except to say that I highly recommend both books; instead I've incorporated the fundamental lessons I found most useful into the list below. I strongly believe the gains you make in adopting these simple practices far outweigh the effort of learning them, and are relevant to and easily adopted by anyone giving a presentation.

However, the books above (and most presentation literature I encountered) are essentially focused on giving better lectures; you talk, the audience listens. In my job I spend a lot of time helping biology faculty make their classes more interactive because we know that active participation (i.e., actually thinking while in class) typically leads to greater learning and retention than pure lecture. And isn't the point of a scientific presentation – whether to your academic colleagues or lay audience – to teach the audience something? I say, when possible and in a useful way, inject some participation into your talk. For the seaweeds talk, I polled the audience several times using hand-held electronic audience response devices called 'clickers' (can easily also do by show of hands), asked them periodically for their experiences with seaweeds and challenged them to identify the number of seaweed species in a picture from the seashore.

 Weaving all these ideas together, I've briefly summarized what I found to be incredibly useful in preparing my seaweeds talk:

The (very brief and incomplete) Fundamentals of a Way Cool Presentation

1) Design your talk before you make any slides. Garr Reynolds calls it Planning Analog. You don't even open your laptop; you get pen and paper, decide on your key goals and outline the points you will make and topics you'll cover to achieve those goals. Of course, first you need to know details like, how long your talk will be, who the audience is, etc. Once you have the outline done, Reynolds recommends fleshing out the details to the point of sketching out (storyboarding) what each slide will look like. For me, resisting the urge to finish an outline before making any slides was a real challenge, albeit, extremely helpful. Storyboarding, however, was too much for me and I didn't do it. Drawing is hard.

2) Fit your talk to your audience. I am utterly flummoxed when seasoned academics continue to make this mistake; I see it all the time and it makes me so angry. Is it laziness? Ignorance? Lack of time? Doesn't matter.  Spend the 15 minutes before you even open your laptop to consider who's in your audience, what amazing insights you have that you want them to know by the time you're done, and the steps you'll take to bridge that gap. Do not include material simply because it was part of your last talk – you fit the talk to the audience, not the other way around. Example, the goal of my seaweeds talk was to foster appreciation for nature in a general audience, so I consciously stripped scientific jargon and as much text as possible in favour of striking visuals. In other words, I used none of the slides from any of my research talks.

3) When possible and appropriate, replace text with a visual. As a grad student I gave ~15 research presentations over the years, all heavily peppered with bullet-point lists of text. The reasons for this were two-fold: 1. lists of text told me what to say next, and 2. everyone else was doing it. These are not good reasons. My goal was to teach the audience about my research and I could have been more effective, I believe, with more effective use of visuals. The subject deserves it's own post someday so I won't get into the how or what of it here. Garr Reynolds has a great blog post on the topic here.

4) Create unity in your slides through consistent and deliberate design choices. I'm running out of writing steam, so in brief:

• build slides using a grid. Again, good Presentation Zen post here about slide design and the "rule of thirds". My seaweeds talk was built using a 5 x 5 grid, which I've made available as a .ppt file here. 
• use a consistent colour pallete and fonts. Using a consistent colour scheme and fonts brings unity and consistency to your presentation. 

Whew, ok, I ran out of steam by the end there so there's less detail than I wanted, but so be it. A deadline is a deadline. So how did the seaweeds talk go? I had 55 people attend, 12 of whom were kids. Kids and adults alike enjoyed answering the survey questions, the kids especially loved being able to vote using the clickers. One of my questions – "when was the last time you ate seaweed" – did not wow the audience as I'd hoped, so I still have much to learn in anticipating the audience. I received many comments that people found the seaweed images beautiful and interesting and they learned something new, so I consider the talk to be a success and mostly due to the lessons I've discussed here.

So, to conclude, I find the challenges of communicating science effectively to be a fascinating subject and one I'd love to discuss with people. I realize I barely scratched the surface of creating an effective presentation here, but I hope you find it helpful. Any comments, suggestions or design stories are greatly appreciated!

 

B.Clarkston seaweed biodiversity Nov.4 2012 from bclarkston

Dusting off the 'to-do' list of projects close to my heart

One year ago this month I began a brand new job as a Science Teaching and Learning Fellow in the biology department at the University of British Columbia. In a nutshell, I help faculty incorporate best teaching practices into their courses and conduct my own research to determine which methods lead to increased student learning – a job that’s both exciting and, I quickly learned, quite different from anything I’d done during the previous six years studying seaweed biodiversity!

While I love my job and my new life in Vancouver, I recently decided to scale-back at work to 60% of full-time from January to the end of April, 2013. My reason for doing this is to try and break out of the work habits I learned as a grad student: work all the time (not necessarily efficiently, but continually), feel guilty when not working, and feel obligated to say ‘yes’ to any task asked of you by the faculty. I’ve complained for years about my lack of time or energy for projects that really interest me and, frankly, I’m sick of my complaints. This time off, and this blog, are part of my plan to learn some new habits: to work hard at my job – but not let it consume my life – and to make time and find energy for other, different projects that I find satisfying and enriching.

I suppose that’s a roundabout way of saying I’m making time for hobbies.

In order to ensure I’m productive during this time, I’m going to use this blog to list my goals and track my progress. My current list of goals needs some refinement and will likely be added to as I go along, but I think it’s a good jumping-off point. In no particular order, I plan to:

1) Improve my knitting skills.

I will complete at least the following: a wearable sweater (my last effort is too ugly to look at), one toque using a mosaic knitting technique, and one pair of top-down socks with a German heel.

2) Read more books.

I will complete two books each month. This month’s books are Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne and Teaching What You Don’t Know by Therese Houston.

3) Spend more time outdoors.

Twice a month I will do something more adventurous than my day-to-day walking, jogging and cycling around Vancouver. Can be anything from hiking, snowshoeing, snowboarding, day-long cycling trip, etc.

4) Practice photography skills.

I have a Canon Rebel T2i that I use regularly, but nowhere near to its full potential. My favourite photography book is The Digital Photography Book Volume1 by Scott Kelby. I have listed 42 techniques from Kelby’s book that I want to improve on and will specifically practice.

5) Increase my professional and personal presence online.

I will create and post weekly to this blog as well as create a professional e-portfolio by the end of January (contains professional documents – CV, teaching statement, etc. – and is updated much less frequently than a blog). A colleague at UBC – Joanne Fox – has a fantastic e-portfolio that I aspire to create someday. 

6) Become more involved in my community through volunteering.

I will volunteer at least once for a cause related to science education outreach, a cause related to the environment, and a cause related to women’s rights. I have two of the three lined-up, more on this to come.

Progress so far? I'm happy to say I'm off to a good start, including getting this much done on my sweater since I began on Jan. 2nd. Here's hoping I can keep this pace up. Any tips or comments are much appreciated!