Leiden City of Science References, Part 1

My friend and colleague Meta Knol, Director of the Leiden 2022 City of Science, asked yesterday for Twitter’s thoughts on “the most engaging, interesting, mind blowing, and inclusive websites and/or online campaign[s]” in the field of art and/or science.

A lot of ideas came to mind! And I thought it would be easier to list them out here than to blast out a series of Tweets.

I decided to focus on unusual science sites rather than art and culture. I also tried to think about what kinds of digital and digital-physical things (sites, apps, platforms, products, convenings) I would want to have rattling around in my mind if I were putting together a year long festival of science.

I’ve broken my thoughts into 5 categories, Websites & Channels; Platforms; Campaigns & Happenings; Media & Products; and Convenings, Places, & Activities. I can see that I definitely have a Western, English language, American/European bias and perspective on things, and I’d be eager to learn of new sites and resources that are more relevant in other contexts. Who is the most popular science blogger in India? Who is doing citizen science in West Africa? I’d really like to know!

A lot of this is just content in its most basic form, writing and speaking – blogging and vlogging — or using other people’s platforms (like Google Earth). I don’t think one needs to build fancy/expensive new websites, apps, or technology platforms to surprise and delight people, especially at first. Nobody cares that Derek Muller’s Veritasium videos are on YouTube and not his own Website or app — they just want to hear what he has to say. (Though the ethics of 3rd party platforms requires careful consideration.)

I also have a bias towards looser, more informal, more bottom-up kinds of productions than one would typically find from cultural and scientific institutions; more “How can we see or reveal the know-how / curiosity / creative capacity of this community?” than “How can we tell the community what we want them to know?”

As I was looking for articles and info about some of these efforts I could feel the influence of formal education — school-based learning. Not that I think school is a bad thing (!), but there’s a tendency for that particular lens with its requirements for standards of learning, formal evaluation, etc. to kind of drain away the open-ended curiosity and joy-of-learning that I find so appealing in so many of these projects. This was particularly evident with projects like Google Earth and Google Expeditions, where the tone of conversation about classroom goals quite overwhelmed the simple beauties of exploration, curiosity, and wonder seen in the experiences of the kids.

The first two categories I came up with — Websites, and Channels and Platforms — are below, and I’ll put the others in subsequent posts.

Here’s a Jamboard showing my initial brainstorm, though I’ve since pared away some ideas and added some new ones.

Websites & Channels


Individual Healthcare Professionals & Epidemiologists on Twitter

  • What: Someone, maybe Farhad Manjoo at the NY Times, observed that individual medical practitioners have been doing an outstanding job of communicating to the public during the pandemic crisis.

  • Why: An example of people in platforms and informal networks doing good.

  • Press/info: …

  • Sample: via Charlie Warzel: “In a 35-tweet thread on Monday, Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, laid out the case for social distancing in American cities.” (Inglesby’s tweets start here: https://twitter.com/T_Inglesby/status/1237138117464715270

SciShow

Teen Vogue

The Brain Scoop

Veritasium

Vi Hart

Wait but Why

Platforms

Bill Nye the Science Guy


BLACK and STEM (#blackandstem)

Creative Commons, Open Science

Experiment.com

Google Cardboard / Expeditions

Google Earth / Google Sky / Google Treks / Google Street View

IEEE Spectrum

  • What: Magazine/blog from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

  • Why: Great writing and content point-of-view at the intersection of science, technology, and society. Nice balance between technical and non-technical language.

  • Website: https://spectrum.ieee.org/

  • Press/info: …

  • Sample: Pick anything on the homepage (good information architecture example of putting your content up front!), https://spectrum.ieee.org/

Instructables

Khan Academy

Minecraft / Minecraft Education Edition

MIT Open Courseware

Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA)

TED & TEDx

TikTok

Wikipedia

YouTube

Zooniverse

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Other post in this series: Part 2: Campaigns and Happenings | Part 3: Media and Products | Part 4: Convenings, Places, Activities