Learn to feel the difference between high load and low load, and good cognitive load and bad cognitive load --- and then how to reduce load in science communication without giving up rigor.
I can't believe I've only just now found out about your work in sharing your science and helping others find more impactful ways to share theirs. I've always hated poster sessions at conferences because the writ approach to poster design is such a bizarre and unhelpful way for learning and remembering the work others are doing. Just subscribed, and hoping I get a chance to meet you and chat scicomm approaches sometime in the future. I'm putting together a scicomm course for our interns and hope you'll be cool with me giving a nod to some of your work and linking them to your videos!
Great to meet you! "Bizzare and unhelpful" is the perfect way to describe the wall of text approach to posters lol. Also, use anything and everything! Go nuts! The betterposter template files are public domain, and feel free to download/screengrab/recut any video and use in slides and stuff. LMK if you need source graphics and I'll send them over! Also starting to consolidate resources on what will become a design-focused science journal: ScienceUX.org
I know. And AI is going to make that number even smaller. I think what we publish will eventually diverge between 1) Feeding new findings to the AI in a structured way and 2) Enjoyable, reproducible computational articles that give the few people who DO read them the best possible experience (with the ability to reproduce/extend the article's analysis in a click). And maybe 3) collaborative simulations like Open Worm. How do you want science to solve the "zero readers" problem?
My question is, as teacher in my country we were 'encouraged' to make interesting task for children yet what i see is yhe majority of teacher don't understand this theory. The more the merrier, more colorful is better etc to the level that i even can grab what the teacher want to do. So how we, as a teacher set borders to avoid cognition overload? Thx
I struggle with the same thing in science. The overloading design that's useless in practice often FEELS the best in the first 2 second impression. Once people try to actually use it, it falls apart. Minimalist instructional design feels incomplete, empty, lazy, unbusy, uninteresting. But works. Research-wise, complexity & liking is curvilinear. So, people don't like things that feel too easy, even if they work best. I've tried to address this problem in posters by adding a little bit more complexity than I think people can actually process, but still much less than the former approach. Seems to get way more approval. Aiming for that midpoint of complexity. How about you? Any tips for me you've had succes swith?
