(This is an excerpt from an article published in Atmospheric Sciences Section Newsletter, Vol. 7, No. 1.)
Mathew Reeve, a PhD student at the Bjerknes Centre in Norway, has created an alternative way to climate blogging. His blog climatesnack.com offers university students and early career scientists a platform to write articles that engage the public in the climate science debate irrespective of their prior experience.
The blog is based around an improvement-by-doing ideology. The more you write, the more you will improve. At the same time, the blog provides a “peer” review process for the articles that are posted on the Internet. This review process is made up of a board of research scientists, university professors and not least fellow bloggers, who go through the texts and provide feedback. Through a true community approach the students develop skills for communicating science to others.
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| Mathew Reeve hopes a lot of young scientists now will start writing for climatesnack.com. |
- Why climatesnack.com?
- It’s a play on words of sorts. The idea for the site started in Norway with the name Klimasnakk. This means 'climate talk'.
However, I like the sound of the name and converted it 'directly' to English. I think it works well, since the site will give its readers and bloggers interesting nibbles of climate information. I also think it conveys the easygoing attitude of the blog. We will not judge anyone on writing skills. The whole point of the blog is to help people improve.
- Where did you get inspiration to create a blog on climate science?
- Last fall I took a scientific writing course on Coursera. An online community sprung up around the course withmany discussion forums covering all aspects of the course content. I learnt a lot during the course. One of the most important lessons was that of continuity. We should keep practicing writing in order to improve. Try and write something every day. That’s obviously very difficult, but you get the idea.
So in essence I created the blog to encourage myself to keep writing. However, I missed the community that the Coursera course had spawned, and the benefits that came from it.
- Could you tell us something about the objectives of your blog?
- Well, once the course was over, the community that followed it scattered. I want the blog to offer the chance to build a community around scientific writing that will remain in place. I want it to motivate climate students and early career researchers to make the first step to improving their writing skills.
As a community, I hope that people will be encouraged to give constructive feedback to their co-bloggers about the structure, flow and clarity of their online articles. The overall objective is to improve our article writing skills. For this, we need to be able to tell a good story, and that takes practice.
- How do you foresee your blog in the future?
- If I am ridiculously optimistic, with hundreds of young and early career climate scientists daring to improve their writing skills. If we can build a blog community built on this mutual improvement concept, then maybe we can. There’s lots of exciting things I would like to implement. For example, it would be great to develop an anonymous peer review system where other members, or maybe even the general public, can review and mark the articles under different topic headings. I really think this would be an amazing way to track bloggers progress through the Climatesnack community.
Maybe they will start with a low score, but after several online articles, their writing improves and so does their score. All this is in the future,but hopefully not the too distant future. With funding we could develop these ideas further and build a strong foundation for this new approach.