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If you are speaking French, this bilingual meeting, titled Science Communication: International Perspectives, Issues and Strategies, to be held in Nancy, 4-7 September, could be very relevant for university museum people: Universities and research organisations are vibrant communities fully engaged in science communication. Their actions are all the more important because the relationship between science, technology […]

Consider this quote: A historian of the not-too-distant future will describe this past decade as marking the “material turn.” If language, and eventually culture, came to distinguish a generational shift in scholarly focus in the second half of the twentieth century, what is occurring now across the range of the humanities—from English literature to the […]

More to the difficulty of displaying abstract concepts in museum exhibits and installations: triggered by a workshop organised as part of the Birkbeck Pain Project, I wrote a post a couple of months ago about the difficulty of displaying pain. A mostly subjective sensation, pain has few, if any, visible physical correlates. Now there is reason to ask the question […]

It’s reasonably easy to imagine how some features of emerging biotechnologies can be turned into museum installations and exhibits. For example, enhancement technologies like nanoprosthetics and tissue engineering can rather easily be imagined as 3D installations. But other concepts are more difficult to translate from words to space. Like morality, for example. I came to […]

For to uger siden udsendte Organisationen Danske Museer (ODM) programmet til det årlige formidlingsseminar den 26. – 28. marts. Seminaret kaldes nu “Internationalt Formidlingsseminar”. Og det undrer mig, for i praksis bryder ODM med et vigtigt princip, som de fleste internationale organisationer bygger på, nemlig at den slags mødeprogrammer først bliver fastlagt efter et åbent “call for papers”. Dvs. princippet — som […]

Most science, technology and medical museum collections have been brought together from nationally located sources, and are usually described and displayed as national treasures. And most large STM museums still define themselves (and are financed) as truly national museums — Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, the Norwegian Science […]

Urtemedicin er ikke uskyldige lægemidler. Man kan se hos den græske læge Dioscorides fra 1.årh.e.Kr. at han bygger på mange generationers dyrekøbte erfaringer.

Last week the existence of a virtual university on Twitter came to my knowledge. Svenska Twitteruniversitetet or The Swedish Twitter University as it is also named. The idea of a Twitter university was born in the mind of Marcus Nilsson (@ozonist) sort of in a random moment (read more about it here). The concept is pretty simple. An […]

Productivity in research is usually measured in terms of number of publications, number of citations, journal impact factors, etc. — and these measures are in turn a major precondition for securing research grants. But perhaps we’re measuring the wrong things, asks Kent Anderson (the scholarly kitchen). Perhaps we should measure instead how many results have been replicated. He […]

Næste tirsdag, den 20. december, vil vores egen Adam Bencard holde et oplæg i INDsigt-seminarrækken ved Institut for Naturfagenes Didaktik, KU, på temaet ‘Æstetik, læring og menneskesyn’: Tilsyneladende er der ikke meget sammenhæng mellem æstetik og undervisning. Æstetik handler om kunst og hvorvidt ting er pæne, og undervisning handler om optagelse af fakta og rationel viden. […]

I came to think about the role of narrativity in museum exhibitions when I saw the programme for the The Swedish National Exhibition Agency’s annual meeting in Visby last week. The aim of the Agency (Riksutställningar in Swedish) is to promote exhibition development. And since Sweden has a pretty strong, and internationally oriented, tradition for exhibition making, these meetings are a […]

A login on Twitter is one of my morning routines – you never know if a tweet may influence the agenda of your day and today I thought I’d share a small Twitter moment with you. This morning I came across a tweet that triggered my Health Information System past and former WHO/Health Metrics Network employer status. […]