How do we teach the teachers? Science educators at all levels need to hear the "inside baseball", the historical context and other interconnections which is too often dismissed as background information of little public interest. Moreover, in physics and increasingly in other fields, "context" means "mathematics", and how do we engage our audience and convey accurate information when numbers are scary? None of the existing venues for online science communication are right for this: magazines are constrained, and blogs are largely swayed, by what's topical. OpenCourseWare is scattered and of uneven quality and coverage. We need to take the ethos of the "explainer" to its logical extreme. Suppose you, Dr. Scientist, have to teach a class on your professional area to first- or second-year undergrads. You need, at a minimum, texts, but nowadays you'll also need simulation codes, sample datasets on which to practice analysis, primary literature to assign as reading.... Can you find all you need from Open-Access sources on the Web? Would you know where to look? Is there just one place to go where everything is there for you, curated and mapped? In the year 2013, why not?
Questions:
- Who could host such a thing?
- Who'd pay for it?
- How do we give it the stamp of professional respectability?
- How do we integrate it into the existing science communication ecosystem?