Dawn's Blog and General News Items

The Canadian Expert Women Database: why it's worth plodding through online forms

Higher Education, People, Science-Policy-Politics, Social Media, Women in Science

My secret vice is reading Clive Cussler adventure paperbacks. I enjoy the way that they weave science, travel, and history together with ludicrous James Bond style heroes and villains. I recently came across the statistic in a Cussler novel, which is very probably rooted in research, that only about 10% of the information in the world's libraries has been digitized, and […]

My 6 favourite #SciComm tweets since I got back on the grid

Citizen Science, Climate Change, Education, Field Work, Inuit and Métis, Nature Photography, Public understanding of science, Science Education, Social Media

I've been back in our wired world for 2 weeks after being off the grid in the arctic for August. While I did have a pricey satellite phone with me, in case my family needed to contact me, I didn't at all miss the internet and the world of cheap mobile phone minutes Lots of […]

August 15 post: Biodiversity & Watershed Management Field Course

Education, Field Work, Forest ecology, Higher Education, People, Plant Biology, Science Education

The 2016 Biodiversity and Watershed Management field course that ran in the first half of July was awesome! This exclusive course is tailored for YorkU students who can't get away from their weekend summer jobs to go on pricey field courses in distant locations. Read the student blog: Urban Watershed Management & Biodiversity I made the posters for […]

Six steps to making your very own Ada Lovelace Day in Fall 2016

People, Public understanding of science, Science Education, Women in Science

Suw Charmin-Anderson launched International Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 as a way of both recognizing, and taking action to reverse the under-representation of women in STEM in Wikipedia. The official day is the 2nd Tuesday of October, but events run through the Fall. I first heard about her project in 2013, and threw around the idea of […]

Doing Public Science with Let's Talk Science & Science Rendezvous

Citizen Science, Education, Public understanding of science, Science Education, York University

Here's my belated June 1st post: I've always believed that learning, teaching and doing science should be fun. Amazingly, while I've been having fun with this over the last 35 years, I've received many disapproving looks from science teachers, professors, and "serious" research scientists.  I have concluded, that they have absolutely no sense of humour, and I've simply ignored their frowns, […]

#WomenInSTEM Resources for the Symposium for Women Entering Ecology & Evolution Today (SWEEET)

Education, Higher Education, Science Education, Science policy, Science-Policy-Politics, Women in Science

Nearly 100 early career ecologists and evolutionary biologists, plus a helping of mid to late career folks, many of us with jet-lag, made it to a lecture hall in Memorial University's Education Building for SWEEET 2016's 09:00 start on Thursday July 7th 2016 . Participant ages ranged from a few months old to mid-70s! We were fortunate that the Canadian […]