COSEE West partnered with COSEE Coastal Trends to present an Ocean Observing Systems (OOS) based curricula and hands-on activities workshop to enable K-12 teachers and informal educators to use real-time or near real-time OOS data. For the past two years, COSEE West has hosted a week long OOS summer workshop for teachers and informal educators in which several scientists presented ocean science content related to their work which uses or contributes to OOS online data.
To support the COSEE mission of engaging scientists and educators to transform ocean science education, COSEE NOW team members have been conducting an annual online scientist survey since 2004 (most recently with the aid of ASLO). This presentation by Chris Parsons, the COSEE NOW evaluator and principal of Word Craft, offers a summary of six years of results on ocean scientists’ involvement in, practices and needs related to education and outreach.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" – Chinese Proverb.
Can we teach scientists to "fish" for their audiences from all walks of life, and enjoy the experience so much that they contribute to informal education for a lifetime? Using cutting-edge multimedia tools and a novel workshop model, COSEE-OS is helping scientists better communicate with the public by working with informal science educators.
The Ocean Gazing podcast is one of COSEE NOW’s primary educational outreach tools. The aim is to provide scientists with a forum for telling their stories about ocean observing science and the broader impacts that science is having on people beyond academic institutions.
In each biweekly episode, Ocean Gazing integrates interviews, ambient sounds gathered in the field and the lab, music, audio recordings from listeners (from children to adults), and the unveiling of a mystery sound. The scientists have said they enjoy participating in the podcast as a mechanism for making their science accessible and promoting the work they do in an engaging and accurate manner. We have between 300 and 400 downloads for each episode, and we are actively promoting Ocean Gazing on Facebook. We've created CDs containing the first 26 episodes and high school curriculum companion pieces for a handful of the podcasts. These are being distributed to scientists and educators.
