By Ric Jensen, University of South Dakota

Introduction
Recently, I began teaching an interdisciplinary course to college juniors and seniors about the public understanding of science. The course examined issues we face in public relations, including the need to communicate in such a way that the message matches the needs and interest of the intended audience (Wilcox, 2009). The course also presented the adoption process with an emphasis on how persuasive communication can be used to get people to embrace new technologies (Kotler, 2009).

The course was structured along the lines of “The Day the Universe Changed”—a Public Broadcasting Service television series created and narrated by science historian James Burke. My goal was to get students to realize that we have always had technology that revolutionizes how people find and share information. The concept was to develop what I call a “You Are There” approach in which students imagine they were living at a point in history when a paradigm-shifting new communication strategy was implemented that radically altered how people communicated at that time. I asked students to compare how they would have been able to communicate had they lived when written languages, the electronic telegraph, the television (and other technologies) were invented. [Read more...]