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YouTube Science Communication Syllabus

Biology / EvoS 283Q 2019 Summer Session 1 Meeting Times: Mondays & Thursdays 10:00 – 12:00 PM  (plus 1 Wednesday 5/29 and one Friday 6/28)

List of Meeting Dates: We meet 11 times in total : May 29, 30 June 3, 6, 10, 13, 17, 20, 27, 28

All meetings are virtual and take place via video chat.

All meetings are required.

Instructor: Maximus Thaler (mthaler1@binghamton.edu) Office hours by appointment – I am available for private video chats most times.

Course Description:

This is a 4 credit course about making evolutionarily themed educational Youtube videos, and about the 4 billion year history of life on our planet. The best way to learn is to teach, and so in this class every student becomes an instructor. Our subject of study is the epic history of the tree of life, and you will learn this history by making 9 short videos.  You are not expected to know anything about video making, or about life’s phylogenetic history at the start of this class, but you are expected to work hard and demonstrate improvement by the end. The best videos in the class will be posted on the course youtube channel.

Course work consists of watching youtube videos made by professional science communicators, making videos of your own, and critiquing the videos of your peers. The majority of your grade is based on peer evaluation. The class is challenging, and requires significant time commitment. Consistent effort will be noticed and rewarded. By the end of the class you will walk away with a deeper understanding of the grand history of life and your place on life’s tree, as well as with foundational skills in video production and editing – a highly sought-after skillset in today’s job market.

Video course description can be found at: https://tinyurl.com/BUyoutubeclass.

 Required Resources:

A computer built in 2015 or newer, with functioning webcam.

An optical mouse.

A smart phone, or higher quality digital camera.

A high speed internet connection (at least 10 mbps)

Zoom, Google Chrome & Google Hangouts.

Adobe Premier Pro.

A one month subscription for $29.99 is available at http://www.adobe.com/

Your computer will need significant processing power to run this software. Contact me if you are concerned your machine is not equipped.

 Optional but Recommended Resources:

Tripod.

Microphone.

External hard drive.

OBS screen and webcam recorder.

Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, & Audition

A one month subscription to the full Adobe CC is available for $74.99 at http://www.adobe.com/

Class Format:

This course takes place completely online. Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays from 10:00 – 12:00 PM, we will virtually gather via Zoom to review each other’s videos Prior to each meeting you will receive an email with the URL video chat room. 

Each meeting we will watch each other’s videos and then grade and critique them. A key component of the class is peer review. You are expected to think critically about your classmates’ videos and offer constructive criticism. The best way to get better at a new skill is to practice, and to listen openly to feedback from others about where you can improve.   

Homework after each class is to watch assigned educational videos, and then to make a video of your own which responds to or summarizes the videos assigned. Course material will become more difficult as the course progresses, to keep pace with your expanding skillset. 

4 credit online summer courses require 35 hours of work per week. Treat this class like a full-time job. We meet as a class for 4 hours a week, meaning you are expected to devote 31 hours a week to homework. This amounts to approximately 15 hours per video you make.

 Throughout the course, in addition to the assigned videos, I will post other educational content or tutorials on making video. Watching these videos is required – they will be your primary source of information on how to do your video assignments. The videos I post will be made by myself and other professional science communicators. I am available for private sessions for help with video editing. 

Course Schedule:

Wednesday May 29: Introductions. HW: What is  life? vlog

Thursday May 30: Peer review What is life? vlogs. HW: Plant ID video

Monday June 3: Peer review Plant ID videos. HW: Fungus  ID video

Thursday June 6: Peer Review Fungus ID videos. HW: Tinbergen’s  4 questions video

Monday June 10: Peer review Tinbergen’s 4 questions videos. HW: Origin  of Life video

Thursday June 13: Peer review Origin of Life videos. HW: History of Life video

Monday June 17: Peer review History of Life videos. HW Symbiosis video

Thursday June 20: Peer  review Symbiosis videos. HW: Final Video Proposal

Monday June 24: Peer  review final video proposals. HW: Final Video

Thursday June 27: Peer review final videos. HW: Course review video

Friday June 28: Reflections and Conclusions  

Evaluation:

Your grade is based out of 130 points. To keep things simple, any 1 point that you receive on assignments will be exactly equal to 1 point on your final grade.

Points are rewarded for completing the following tasks:

A)        Attendance: 11 points

This class meets 11 times during summer session I. Each time you virtually attend a seminar you will receive 1 point.

Log in on time! The fact that the course is online does not remove the punctuality norms of a standard university class.

Missed broadcasts: If you have a legitimate reason for missing a seminar, you must contact me before class and arrange how to make it up.

B)          Watching Educational Youtube Videos: 11 points

Throughout the course, I will be posting videos from a variety of science youtubers. I will also be posting tutorials I have made about how to complete specific assignments. You are required to watch all of these videos. Think of this as your textbook for the class.

There is much more excellent content on youtube that I could ever provide you links to. You are strongly encouraged to explore on your own. Watching many videos, from many genera and styles, is one of the best ways to improve your content and develop a unique video voice. You are also required to watch the videos your classmates make.

At the end of the class you will be asked to submit a word document enumerating a list of all the videos you watched during summer session 1. Here is a video tutorial about how to generate a list of watched videos from your youtube history.

Points will be rewarded based on the number of videos you watch. You will be rewarded between 1 and 11 points for this video list assignment. The more videos you watch, the higher this portion of your grade will be. If there are videos in your history you would prefer I do not know you have watched, simply remove them from the list before submitting it.

This is not meant to be tricky or invasive. I won’t be closely scrutinizing your watching decisions closely – I’m just going to skim the list at the end of the semester to make sure that you engaged with the content of the class.

C)        Educational Videos: 72 points

 You will be submitting 9 videos this semester, 7 of which will be graded by your peers. A video is due each lecture. Each peer reviewed video is worth 9 points, except your final video which is worth 18. Your final grade for each video will be the average of the grades your peers assign.

You will be provided with much more information in the coming days about what is expected from these videos. For now, here is an abbreviated rubric to give you a sense of how your videos will be evaluated.

Video grading rubric:

Your videos will be graded on a 9 point scale. Grades are based on the following qualities:

Clarity(1-3 points): Your communication should be clear and accurate. Use simple language. Focus on brevity. A video in this class should not be longer than 4 minutes unless absolutely necessary. Your communication should be quick, with no time wasted. Videos which are longer are usually boring. Make sure you have an explicitly stated focus. Your video should have an overall thesis, and every second of the video should be in service to that thesis.

Creativity(1-3 points): Your video should have aesthetic quality, and use novel techniques to keep the viewers’ attention. Use animations, props, and other secondary visual cues to make your point twice, once with words, once with visuals. Unusual titling, effective animation, illustrations, novel props, and innovative cinematography are some of the many ways to make your video unique.

Technical skill(1-3 points): Your videos should utilize basic editing and cinematography techniques to ensure your content is tight and easy to watch. Cuts should be clean, with no pauses in between shots. Speakers should be framed using the rule of thirds. Titles and other post production content should be well timed.  

Descriptions of videos receiving various grades:

9: A video which receives the full 9 points will be promoted and published on the class youtube channel. A 9 point video is short, accurate, and has a clear thesis. The editing is clean, and it uses creative visual methods to reinforce the points made by the narrator. The video has an engaging thumbnail and title.

8: A 8 point video is accurate and clear, but may be slightly too long. The editing is clean, and efficient, but not necessarily innovative. Narration is reinforced by secondary visual cues effectively, but minimally. The video has an engaging thumbnail and title.

6: A 6 point video is mostly accurate and fairly easy to follow, but there may be small factual errors or ambiguities. Editing is clean, but could be better reinforced by more elaborate secondary visual cues. The video could be improved if it were shortened.

4: A 4 point video gets the job done, but there may be factual errors which undermine it. Or, while the details of the video may be accurate, it may be rather simple, and not explain very much. The video may lack a clear thesis or a sense of focus. Editing could be tightened, and the narration could be significantly improved by secondary visual cues.

3: A 3 point video needs improvement. It has factual errors and does not synthesize the subject into a cohesive story. If the video has a thesis, or much of the video is tangential and does not argue the thesis well. The pace of the video is slow, with little done during editing to hold the viewers’ attention.

0: A 0 point video is incomplete or never uploaded.

E)          Effort and Improvement: 36 points

A critical note about grades: Grades do not represent your worth as a human being.

Grades exist for institutional reasons, not human reasons. Grades exist so that institutions can communicate about their educational caliber. Grades do not reflect how much you know, they reflect how well you were able to adapt your scholastic efforts to the university system.

 I do not appreciate student concerns about low grades. I think worrying about your grade misses the point. Grades are there motivate you, not to measure you. If you receive a low grade, interpret the grade as a message to try harder, not a message that you are inadequate in some way. This point bears repeating: Grades in this class are a motivational tool, not a measurement.

The 36 points dedicated to effort and improvement are there to make the motivational purpose of grades explicit. These are points I will award to you at the end of the semester holistically, based on how hard you tried, and how much your videos improved over the course of the semester. In grading this section, I will pay particular attention to your first and last videos as an indication of your passion for the course material and your improvement over time.

 I don’t care if your grades are high or low. I care that you are learning, and that you can do something at the end of this class that you could not do at the beginning. 36 points is the difference between a C and an A. As long as you demonstrate to me that you are trying your best, and that you are learning, then you will receive most of these 36 points.

 So do not be concerned about low grades. The grading structure is built so that any student who is working hard will do well. If you do not work hard, you will not do well, and if you try your best, your final grade will reflect it. It’s really that simple.

Grade Summary:

11 (Attendance) + 11 (Video Watch History) + 72 (Videos) + 36 (Effort) = 130 points

 A+ 126-130, A 121-125, A- 116-120, B+ 111-115, B 106-110, B- 101-105, C+  96-100, C 91-95 C- 86-90, D+ 81-85 

A note on writing:

The deliverables of this class come in video form, but this means that your writing actually needs to be of higher quality. The fact that you will be speaking your words doesn’t let you off the hook, it constrains what kind of things you can write so that they are clear and easily vocalizable. Script writing is hard. I recommend that you read everything aloud that you write, to make sure it sounds good. I am available for extra help on script writing by appointment.

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Niko Tinbergen’s 4 Questions

In 1963, Niko Tinbergen published a paper called On aims and methods of ethology. The paper outlines four questions whose answers are required for a complete understanding of biological behavior and form. 

The Four Questions are:

What is its Function? What is the trait there to do?

What is its Development? How did the trait come to be?

What is its Evolution? What is the traits phylogenetic history?

What is its Mechanism? How does the trait work?

The Four Questions Approach has become a valuable tool in evolutionary pedagogy. By asking these four questions, students gain a powerful heuristic for learning about the biological world around them. 

Modern research usually focuses on one of the four questions in isolation. Molecular biologists usually study mechanism, while, ecologists study function. Tinbergen’s paper is an important reminder that a thorough understanding of the biological world requires multiple perspectives. 

Announcing the EvoS Seminar Series

On Thursday July 6th (12:00 noon EST) Dr. David Sloan Wilson will be lecturing on the Four Questions as the first of 10 lectures to be broadcast in July for the new Online Evos Seminar Series. 

Every Monday and Thursday from July 6th to August 7th, we will be broadcasting live lectures from a fascinating collection of biologists and science communicators. A Four Questions approach is essential for appreciating their diverse perspectives, so join us this Thursday for an introductory lecture by David Wilson! 

The lecture will be broadcast on the EvoS Seminar Series Youtube Channel 

Below is the complete schedule for the series:

July 6  David Wilson – This View of Life – Tinbergens 4 Questions

July 10  Ines Dawson – Draw Curiosity – The Evolution of Cooperation

July 13 Ursula Goodenough – Religious Naturalist Association - Religiopoesis 

 July 17  Molly Edwards – Science IRL – Columbine Flower Ontogeny

 July 20 Jessica Hua – Phenotypic Plasticity

 July 24  Mazin Qumsiyeh – Palestine Museum of Natural History – Biodiversity in Palestine

 July 27 Joan Strassmann - The Evolution of Organismality 

July 31  Madza Virgens – The Evolution of Birdsong in Bengalese Finches

August 3  Terrence Deacon – Hierarchic Evolutionary Transitions 

 August 7 Will Ratcliff – Evolution of Multicellularity in Yeast

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Holding hands is more important than you think!

This week on the EvoS Seminar Series we heard a talk from Dr. James Coan. 

Dr. Coan is a neuroscientist who specializes in measuring social cognition. 

His work falls under the heading of Social Baseline Theory. The critical claim of social baseline theory is that humans are inherently social creatures. Just as fish gills indicate that fish are aquatic creatures, the human mind has a suite of adaptations which indicate that we are social creatures. 

For the entirety of human evolution (some 6,000,000 years) people have always relied on other people. Social aid has been a fixture in humanity's evolutionary environment, and our brains should reflect this. 

Dr. Coan’s actual experiments are gruesomely simple. He puts people in an fMRI machine, shocks them, and watches what happens to their brain. And the variable that he manipulates is simple handholding. 

It turns out that holding hands with a friend or loved one isn’t just comforting, it actually makes the pain from the shock genuinely less painful - like, the pain processing regions of the brain aren't as active when you’re holding hands.  

But the handholding effect goes even deeper. In one experiment, instead of shocking the human in the fMRI machine, instead Coan shocked their partner. And what he found was fascinating: 

It turns out that the way a brain responds to the threat of being shocked is strikingly similar to the way it responds to the threat of a partner to being shocked. In other words, the brain acts as if a threat to itself, and a threat to a partner, are the same threat. 

Dr. Coan has a radical explanation for this. He claims his studies indicate that the way that humans conceive of themselves is completely contingent on their relationship with others. On a deep neurological level, we often behave as if our loved ones are ourselves. 

If you want to learn more, check out the paper Dr. Coan presented on: Social Baseline Theory and the Social Regulation of Emotion

Here is the talk Dr. Coan gave, unedited

and here are some highlights from the Q&A - a super interesting question about how the internet is shaping our social relationships

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There’s nothing like a good Story...

We don’t usually think of Scientists as Storytellers. Perhaps we should. 

Let me introduce you to the Science to Narrative Chain. 

Scientists discover facts (or so we are told).  But what are those facts for? Facts on their own can do very little, but when they’re combined into narratives they can change the world.  This summer, the TVOL1000 is launching an online symposium called the EvoS Seminar Series. We’ll be presenting all the links of the Science to Narrative chain in order. 

Twice a week in July we’re hosting scientists live on our Youtube channel. They’ll present peer reviewed papers which tackle the Big Questions in biology 

But let’s be real here - you and I both know that you don’t have time to read a thick paper and watch a long talk. Who does? But those things are just the first links in chain. 

In addition to hosting scientists and papers and lectures, we tell stories. For each of our speakers we’re posting a short (but thorough) video about their work and how it fits into the Big Picture.

We’re building links in the chain. Sometimes actual science is dense and tedious - and sometimes science journalism is shallow clickbait. But by connecting the science directly with the stories that we tell about it, we make the whole process better. 

Subscribe to our channel if you want to be part of the chain. 

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Introducing EvoS Seminar Series Online

What is it?

The EvoS Seminar Series is a free, public, online seminar about deep questions in biology. We provide access to knowledge in both peer-reviewed and vlog form. 

~ Filling the missing links in the Science to Narrative Chain ~

Every Monday and Thursday in July, we will be hosting biologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and science communicators to provide their perspective on what it means to be an Organism. We’ll be posting peer reviewed papers, live lectures, chats with scientists, and thorough summary vlogs twice a week, July 5 - August 12.

Check out the videos below for a sample:

A summary vlog of Dr. Jim Coan’s lecture on Social Baseline Theory:

An excerpt from the live chat:

Dr. Coan’s full presentation:

Follow us, subscribe on Youtube, etc, etc :)