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ESCW: the European Science Communication Workshops

Final Report Summary - ESCW (The European science communication workshops)

The ultimate aim of the ESCW project was to help address the needs of scientists to communicate. This European science communication network (ESCONET) embodied a unique, cross-European collaboration between science communication researchers, scientists, science information officers, science journalists and policy-makers. Designed primarily to help trainers who wanted to run training workshops, the modules were put together to provide a framework, a scaffold, onto which effective science communication training could be hung.

The ESCONET workshops consisted of 17 institutions involved with higher education and science, covering 12 countries eligible for the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) funding. It had contracted to carry out three training workshops during the course of 30 months. In the end, as a result of being able to mobilise additional resources in support of its activities, it delivered three core training workshops, two additional workshops to train the new generation of trainers, and a series of ESCONET-related workshops in conjunction with other partners. The project was finally extended to run for 38 months, on a no-extra-cost basis, to allow ESCONET to present sessions at a conference in Malmo in June 2008, thereby ensuring that its work became known to a wide audience of those involved in science communication training and activities.

The development of the initial drafting of the ESCONET modules was carried out by a Curriculum development team (CDT) during the first 12 months of the project. That team identified topics to be covered and divided the work so that two members of the CDT took responsibility for each of the modules. After the initial drafts had been prepared they were sent out for comment to the entire network. Comments, as appropriate and feasible, were included into second drafts. Editing of the modules continued until the very end of the project, with modifications being made in the light of new comments and - most importantly - the experience gained by ESCONET in delivering the modules in actual workshops. Thus the modules that were presented at the end of this report represented the collective work of all 17 partners.