Jen here –
I am a member of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) Education Committee. One of our primary annual activities is to host a virtual Natural History Education (NHE) DemoCamp. This year was our third iteration of the DemoCamp. The goal of the NHE DemoCamp is to share, discover, and discuss educational materials that have a framework in natural history. This is building upon our previous iterations of the ‘education share fair’ that were hosted at the in person SPNHC annual meetings from 2018–2019.
Educational materials that were shared by presenters varied widely in scope, audience, format, and topic from how to engage audiences with virtual natural history collections resources to how to build engaging in-person public programming. You can find short descriptions and links to each educational resource on the event’s abstract volume. You can also find recordings for all of the demo sessions on the DemoCamp website — these will soon also be available on the SPNHC YouTube Channel. This year’s NHE DemoCamp had over 150 registrants with 14 different live demonstrations and discussions that took place over the two days.
We are encouraging all of our presenters to share their resources as Open Education Resources (OER) on the SPNHC Natural History Education Portal. This portal is also open to anyone! We welcome anyone to add their education or outreach materials to this community space. It only takes a short amount of time to create an OER and it will increase your resource visibility. The portal is hosted on QUBESHub, which also gives your resource a DOI and allows others to duplicate your content and make modifications while linking back to the original resource. It also tracks metrics that are easily reportable. If you’re interested but aren’t sure how to get started, contact our committee at our gmail account: educationdemocamp @ gmail.com
A huge thank you to all of the organizers from the SPNHC Education Committee and to all of our partners that helped us spread the word! Stay tuned for announcements for next year’s NHE DemoCamp! We are also always looking for new partnerships and members. Please fill out our interest form for more information, or reach out to us through email!
- Read another blog post: https://www.biodiversityliteracy.com/democamp
- Head to the Natural History Education DemoCamp website: https://spnhc.org/education-democamp/