Matt Thurling on the concept of science.TV

Another comment turns to blog post to make it more visible: Following my post on science.TV, Matt Thurling, founder explained the concept of it in a lengthy comment, that sheds light on the ins and outs of science.TV (emphasis added by me):

Although science.tv has been some three years in the making, we’re still in the very early stages. The site is live, but it should probably be labelled ‘alpha version’ because, in terms of functionality, it’s only about 10% of what’s to come. And in terms of content, it’s even less developed.

The content that’s on the site at the moment is admittedly something of a mixed bag. It actually represents one small part of science.tv – fun resources for teachers to use in classes to demonstrate phenomena. The few films that have been uploaded or linked have come from the focus group of teachers involved in the project.

We did some interesting research a while back on what ‘science’ means to different kinds of people. For scientists and academics, it’s about pursuit of the truth via the scientific method; for pretty much everyone else, it’s actually more about the products of science. What’s also interesting is the meaning of ‘experiment’, and what seems to be taught to school students is not experimentation at all, but the ‘correct’ performance of rituals with set outcomes.

This is way too big a problem for a bunch of film makers and computer programmers in Bristol to address. All we can do is provide a platform for a whole load of new experiments in science communication. It’s not up to us to dictate that scientists should do more to reach audiences outside of their immediate networks. What we can do is help them to find not only the audience, but also the specialist film-makers – people who want to make more challenging science content but who have been bound by the dumbed-down, mass-media model of broadcast TV for the past three decades.

So all I can say is watch this space. There is content coming over the next few weeks, from a variety of sources. But if you really want to help us, then please sign up and upload your films. Check out the categorisation of content, the tagging and the search functionality and if there’s anything missing then let us know and we’ll do our best to include it in later releases.

Matt Thurling