This post is partly inspired by a recent tweet that I saw by a professor (I can't find the tweet, but I think that it was either Meghan Duffy or Kate Clancy) that their main contribution to science might be via their science blogging, rather than their peer-reviewed publications. I found this interesting and intriguing, […]

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Some digitally created content, like ill-considered tweets seems to last forever, coming back to haunt the author at most inopportune times. But other digital content, that you spent precious time creating, can disappear. Storify, which was software that allowed tweets to be strung together, along with commentary, and other media, to create a longer narrative […]

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If you're a devoted reader of my blog, which I sincerely hope that you are not, and that you have better things to do with your time, you will notice that this post is part of my earlier post on Professor Pat Lakin-Thomas' VLOG on the Biology Department's Research Practicum course. In the summer of […]

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I covered some of my challenges with blogging in the first of this "about those missing  blog posts..." series. Today I want to talk about link rot. This refers to what happens when you link to a live url (uniform resource locator) in a blog post, but at some point, the link to this content breaks. […]

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Smart phones not only put advanced photographic capacity into the hands of everyone who owns one, but also an ability to record amazing videos. An emerging research literature is documenting the power of these technologies in taking science communication to the next level. I have been posting home-made science communication videos, made with iMovie, on […]

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This post IS about science blogging, but not about link rot in blogs, as promised yesterday. I will publish on that, later this week. From its beginning, I have contributed to the University of Reading in the UK's Advent Botany blog series, now in its fifth year. My posts have allowed me to indulge my passion […]

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I learned how to blog in 2006 when I became director of York University's Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability. I quickly realized that a successful institute focussing on sustainability, had to do much more than ivory-tower-situated research, and that we needed to find ways of meaningfully engaging all members of the campus community. For […]

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We held our fourth annual Wikipedia Editathon on Thursday October 11th 2018 in Steacie Science and Engineering Library.   On Monday October 22nd, Prof. Jeremy Kerr will give York's 4th Ada Lovelace Day lecture: Waiting for Equity or Making it Happen: What’s the Difference? Jeremy's talk is at 12:30 pm in Room 107 of the Life […]

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When I returned to my full-time undergraduate teaching load in 2014, after 7 years of having a reduced teaching load while I was director of IRIS, I included a series of new assignments in my Biology courses. In addition to learning about ecology, they taught students social media skills that included using Twitter for science […]

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Late last year, my friend, Prof. Shoshanah Jacobs of Guelph University, proposed a panel about Science Twitter for the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution Annual Meeting that would be happening in July 2018 at Guelph. I immediately agreed, because the other panelists were to include some of Canada’s top ecologists active on social media, […]

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