Last week, I was at the Communicating Science Convention at Harvard/MIT University. I met around 50 people who were as active in outreach activities as I was!

We had panels about:

Communicating science to the non-scientist, Using Science to promote advocacy, communicating science using fiction, the difference between academic and non-academic publishing, communicating with the media, and Using Mulitmedia to communicate science.

I can’t believe how awesome it turned out to be! However, I think the most interesting thing came on Saturday morning. We got together as a group of geoscientists (there were six of them plus me at the conference) and decided to create Geoscibites, which is an offshoot of Astrobites. All of these sites were created to distill knowledge and information to the general public (undergrads especially). The primary way of doing this is taking currently published journal articles and translating them from “sciencese” to easily understandable snippets!

Geoscience is a very big field (Geology, Hydrology, Climate Science, Soils and Agronomy, Oceanography, Atmospheric Science and more), so it will be difficult summarizing all of these research findings.

We will be featuring “Climate Monday”, “Rock Talk Tuesday”, “Wet Wednesday”, “Dirty Thursday”, and “Feature Friday”.

I, clearly, would fit best under Dirty Thursday.

Here’s to hoping that the site takes off, since the inaugural members are spread all over the country (California, New England, North Carolina, Florida).

This, on top of the Soils4teachers.org and soils4kids.org make my outreach life really full…

Bit off more than I can chew? Oh yea! And loving any minute of it!