Honestly, the topic was the first thing that caught my attention. Ebola was heavily covered by the media last year and while I knew that it was highly contagious and dangerous, I was curious about the details. When I finally made my way over to the poster, no one was there to pitch it. Now, I usually wouldn’t have been compelled to read over a whole poster without someone explaining it, but this one was set up in such a way, that I didn’t mind. And that is another reason (really the *main reason*) why I liked this poster so much. It had a story-like example of an ebola case running across the top, kind of like a cartoon strip. That pretty much convinced me to stay and read the rest. Words were kept at a minimum, which you’d think would be difficult when explaining something very scientific, but they managed with pictures and diagrams. Besides for making the poster more aesthetically pleasing, it also made it more approachable and simple to understand (especially for the non-premed person). They added in points about cultural influences as well, which I found really interesting.
All in all, cool topic, fun setup, great visuals, ooh la la poster.
Ebola Explained VERY WELL 🙂
I was able to see this poster at the poster session also and I agree that it was a very visually appealing, engaging, and informative poster. It really explained Ebola in a way that wasn’t just throwing facts at people, it displayed the facts in an engaging, easy to understand way. However, my complaint about that poster is that there wasn’t really a question presented to be answered or any research that went into the poster. It was basically just an interesting, in depth explanation of Ebola. For this topic, I guess there really isn’t a question you could ask or data that can be collected other than statistics about the prevalence of the disease. However, I feel like the because the poster didn’t really prove anything or find anything out other than facts about Ebola, it made other posters at the poster session that conducted original research or aimed to prove something feel like stronger posters.
This is why I have a problem with the poster session in general. We need to have some consistency amongst the Macaulay sections across all the campuses. It seems that each of us professors provided different expectations and requirements. I think the Ebola poster is great in that it seems to exemplify the communication format. If I did not require that all our groups use original data or metadata, then you could have focused solely on communicating a science topic. Maybe some of you will address this issue in the reflection journal entry on posters.
I like how we both wrote our poster blogs about the same Ebola poster, yet both of our experiences with that poster were so different. Originally I had planed to just glance over the poster since most of what was on the poster, were images. But the people in the group were the ones that made me like the poster a lot. However in your case you didn’t even have the students give you their little presentation with the poster. It shows that most people like posters for many different reasons, even when it comes to the same poster.