Critiques of 12 of the very best internet sites to help students with science fair project ideas, experiments and displays. Depending on your persuasion, diffusionist or social constructionist, the report either gave the PUS movement its institutional impetus, or it is the stroke that broke the camel’s back, prompting crucial discussion of the report’s theoretical foundation: the deficit, or empty-teapot model of science communication.
In practice, this implies that practically all ‘science’ needs to be demolished (or allowed to collapse) and actual science carefully rebuilt outside the skilled research structure, from the ground up, by real scientists who regard truth-seeking as an crucial and truthfulness as an iron law.
The discarding of traditions of apprenticeship and prolonged human contact in science was not due to any new discovery that apprenticeship was – after all – unnecessary, let alone that the new bureaucratic systems of free-standing explicit aims and objectives, guidelines, summaries and lists of core information and competencies, tick-boxes and numerical rating and so on.
Primarily it is a mixture of both this blog and my other blog SouthernPlayalisticEvolutionMusic I’ll continue to write about science for non-scientists and I hope everyone finds some new favourite science blogs to appreciate whilst you happen to be more than there.
Suppose that most competent and hardworking real scientists really make no indispensable and distinctive contribution to actual science – none at all – but merely incremental improvements, minor checks or refinements in techniques, the precision of measurements and the expression of theories.
