Team:UNSW Australia/Education/Interview

OVERVIEW

Science communication between those within the scientific community is essential for advancing scientific research and allows for others to build up from the work of others. Due to this, means of scientific communication in the sharing of thoughts, resources, research and more is essential and can be facilitated through forums such as MolecularCloud. MolecularCloud is an open-access, not-for-profit science communication platform sponsored by GenScript. As a communication platform they are at the forefront of improving scientific communication.

This MolecularCloud interview session started with the sponsorship that they were offering by posting about our team’s project on their website in early 2020. After a couple of months, they managed to contact us through our Instagram account for an interview. Since we would like to communicate our project to a wider audience, we agreed to do so. Then, on 1 October 2020, our team took part in an interview with Josemary Medrano from MolecularCloud which was later uploaded to the MolecularCloud Instagram and YouTube channel where it obtained over 300 views in total. A recording of our interview can be found on the MolecularCloud social media page.

Online interview with Josemary Medrano from MolecularCloud

As part of this interview we prepared brief presentation slides to explain our project. We chose to use presentation slides as we found it to be a more effective way of communicating our project. This is particularly true for visual learners where visual presentation would increase their understanding of the materials. (1) However, the target audience of our presentation were individuals with scientific knowledge, excessive explanation was not required.

Furthermore, an interview format was chosen to communicate with Josemary as it was a more direct method of communicating and discussing our ideas where answers can be readily provided in the discussion. This leads to an effortless and productive dialogue between us and MolecularCloud. In addition to this, the recording of the interview allows us to present the content to a significantly greater audience with the aim of communicating our project to other scientific communities to develop other innovative solutions to save corals.

Reference

  1. Kasinathan V, Medi I, Mustapha A, O’Daniel TP. Assessing the impact of presentation mining on understanding among visual learners. Journal of Engineering Science and Technology. 2018 Jul; special issue:116-131.