Newspaper headline about Gutenberg smoking room. How to turn kitchen conversations into an educational project
The Gutenberg Smoking Room is a non-commercial popular science project, a finalist for the Ministry of Education's Loyalty to Science Award in the Best Popular Science Project of 2015 nomination. The Gutenberg Smoking Room is a phenomenon of the volunteer educational movement and the most visited lecture hall in Russia.
"Smoking room" was born in 2012. Initially, it was a friendly club for lovers of popular science and non-fiction literature. We gathered in a narrow circle of friends to retell books to each other and just talk in English. interesting topics from the world of science.
In 2014, the project became crowded within the club of interests, and the "Smoking room" was transformed into a real lecture hall. In 2015, Kurilka branches appeared in 15 cities, and more than 14,000 people attended our events. We have organized more than a hundred popular science events, at which more than 300 scientists spoke, from graduate students to academics.
Today, the project has acquired international status, having launched a branch in Minsk, and preparing the launch of the project in other countries. At the moment, more than 500,000 people have watched our lectures on the Internet, and more than 22,000 people have visited the project events live!
The main driving force of the project is the love for science, progress and the unquenchable light of knowledge!
We want to involve as many people as possible in science, so admission to all our events is free, since everyone should be able to freely come for new knowledge.
Due to the lack of budget, we do not have the opportunity to purchase high-quality equipment for recording lectures. Because of this, videos are not always obtained. good quality, and a decent number of lectures are not published at all. This is important, because a lecture attended live by 200 people can be watched by more than 20,000 people on the Internet!
We can continue to record lectures on existing equipment, but in this case, we risk losing even more high-quality popular science content.
Another problem that we want to solve is related to the situation in small regional cities, namely the lack of popular science events there. We want there to be events with the best popularizers of science from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok and other major scientific centers of Russia. We would like to bring more strong specialists to the regions.
Organizing a lecture hall with an eminent scientist in Moscow or St. Petersburg is not difficult, but bringing him to Tobolsk, Mirny or Bratsk is problematic. We want you to have the opportunity to attend events with the participation of the best Russian and foreign scientists, regardless of where you live!
For 18 months now we have been honestly working for you and all popularizers of science, never asking for anything in return, but the time has come when the future of the project depends on you. Support us, and we promise that we will do everything to make the torch of enlightenment burn even brighter!
- For 600,000 rubles we will be able to purchase a minimum necessary equipment for several (9) lecture hall branches.
- If we collect 1 million 150 thousand rubles we can provide equipment for all 17 branches of the lecture hall that exist today.
- If we raise 2 million 200 thousand rubles, we will be able to launch a program of business trips for scientists and science popularizers from major scientific centers in Russia to small regional cities.
- If we collect 3,000,000 rubles, then the dream of many will come true - we will bring Neil deGrasse Tyson to Russia! Yay!
The world we live in is an amazing place full of secrets and mysteries. We live in an amazing time when scientists from all over the world are changing our understanding of the Universe, the microworld and life in all its manifestations. Help us tell the public about science, and we will not be indebted!
Over the course of the project, the Gutenberg Smoking Room has gained great respect and support from scientists, educational institutions, Ministry of Education and other popular science projects!
If you are subscribed to at least one popular science educational public in in social networks, phrase "Smoking Room Gutenberg" you are probably familiar with. It took about a year for this project to turn from a Moscow semi-closed club of science-pop literature lovers into a volunteer network of lecture halls that covered a dozen and a half cities of the country - from Moscow to Vladivostok.
According to the format, “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is 3 open lectures of 30 minutes each about “life, the universe and all that” in a popular science vein, followed by a discussion. Meetings can take place in any venue that can accommodate those who wish: from university auditoriums to trendy cafes.
In July 2014, Roman Pereborshchikov became the project manager, and Kurilka headed towards the lecture hall. From stories about specific books, they switched to lectures on popular science topics, which also determined the conditions for choosing speakers: if initially it was enough to read a book and be able to talk about it in a fascinating way, now the speakers should be experts in the field they are talking about. Not everyone scientific topics can be explained to the unprepared public "on the fingers" in half an hour, so there are requirements for the quality of video presentations.
The range of topics for lectures has always been wide - from classical philosophy to quantum physics. Everything related to the latest data of science about the structure of man, society and the world at the most different levels may be the subject of discussion. The organizers said (and still say) a strict “no” to esotericism and personal growth trainings. Unless, of course, you want to consider them in a scientific way.
The meetings soon began to gather 200 listeners each, and the real stars of pop science became the speakers. But Gutenberg's Smoking Room would have remained one of the many Moscow lecture halls (Muscovites can't complain about the lack of intellectual events), if it hadn't stepped into the virtual space.
The first "Smoking room" in the format of a large lecture hall in Moscow. Medieval historian Mikhail Mayzuls talks about the evolution of the Japanese mentality.
In 2014, Kurilka got its own YouTube channel where video recordings of lectures began to be posted. The project "made friends" with a super popular resource "Educator", whose Vkontakte page now has over 300,000 subscribers. Obrazovach gave access to an audience of thousands across Russia and a new name for what was happening (now officially it is Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room).
Now, enthusiasts anywhere in the country can be inspired by YouTube videos, want their city to fall in love with science in the same way, and write about it to Roman Pereborshchikov, the head of the Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room project. Roman will readily tell you how to organize a lecture hall and provide information support. Moscow , St. Petersburg , Kazan , Rostov-on-Don , Kaluga , Omsk , Astrakhan , Vladivostok , Mound , Ufa , Novosibirsk , Tomsk , Krasnodar , Chelyabinsk- cities that have already hosted the Gutenberg Smoking Room at least once. Video recordings of all performances from the cities are sent to the editing department of the Moscow "Smoking Room", which employs 10 people. Recently, recordings have been subtitled for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Biologist, science journalist and administrator of the VKontakte community "Scientists against pseudoscience" Alexander Panchin - about why you should not be afraid of genetic engineering.
“In fact, we are stimulating the creation of lecture halls throughout the country. The Gutenberg Smoking Room is not one lecture hall, but fifteen, united by one name and idea. Over the past year, we have held more than 100 lecture events, which were attended by about 14,000 people. Now about 80 people are involved in the project instead of just one, large museums and universities have become our partners, and the goal of the project was to create the first federal lecture hall in Russia,” Roman says about the growth of the project, worthy of a good business presentation. But "Smoking Room" is a fundamentally non-commercial project.
The main advantage of our project is its main drawback - a completely non-commercial development model. Usually, the lack of a budget puts an end to many projects that deserve public attention, but we have turned this minus into a plus. The lecture hall is expanding not by increasing the budget and staff, but due to the ideology that it embodies: the popularization of science in society by the forces of society itself. Modern youth is ready to take responsibility for what only universities and other educational and cultural institutions were doing before us.
Roman Pereborshchikov
The baton of science popularization in cities is often taken over by those who already have some organizational and educational experience. For example, in Kazan, the Center for Contemporary Culture "Change" (we once) became the permanent site of the "Smoking Room". In St. Petersburg, the meetings are organized by the "live warm lamp" discussion club "Pinch of Salt". In Vladivostok, the team that had previously created the science cafe Let’s Science! on the basis of the Far Eastern Federal University.
We have been making a smoking room in Vladivostok since May of this year. And the desire to do it appeared, because we were fascinated by the scale of the project. It's nice to feel that your views on the need for society to popularize knowledge are shared enough a large number of people all over the country.
We have enough resources in the city to create educational projects. There are both interesting specialists and requests from listeners. We actively cooperate with all educational platforms that we have, because together we can make more interesting and large-scale events. For example, together with another lecture hall, we organized a teleconference with the Moscow Kurilka, during which we talked with the authors of the Sputnik Mayak rocket-building project.Anton Krotov coordinator of Gutenberg Smoking Room in Vladivostok
The local TV channel tells how the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Vladivostok organized a large-scale science festival as part of the All-Russian festival of the Enlightener award.
If in the same Kazan "Change" managed to form a circle of listeners ready for various forms of conversation, then for many cities open lectures on science are a bold experiment, the results of which are difficult for the organizers to predict. For example, after the first "Smoking Room" in Chelyabinsk (which took place just a month ago), the organizers admitted to a local journalist that they were expecting a maximum of 30 spectators. And 150 came! And most of them voted for the second one to take place after the first "Smoking Room". Somewhere things are not going so briskly, and in Kaluga, for example, the format has not taken root (but it is quite possible that there will be those who want to try it again).
The third participant of the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Tomsk is about video encoding.
The natural (and often the only) source of speakers in cities is the local scientific community. A young graduate student or “settle down” scientist of any direction can give a fascinating lecture to a completely new audience for himself, and then collect views and “likes” on the general YouTube channel.
Any meeting of young scientists with the public, whether there are 70 or 170 people in the hall, is already a success. In one case, an unexpected selection of lectures can be considered luck: for example, one evening we listened to lectures on intuition, Platonic philosophy and quantum physics; another time about schizophrenia, political competition and firefighting; or - about dreams, quantum computers and string theory. A separate success can be considered the excitement of the audience's interest, when after 10 minutes allotted for questions from the audience, the discussion flows into the lobby and continues for another 20-30 minutes.
Denis Volkov coordinator of Gutenberg Smoking Room in Kazan
Denis Volkov notes that physics and medicine have always been successfully developed in Kazan, and representatives of these sciences traditionally collect applause in the Kurilka. For example, a lecture by a practicing neurologist Ksenia Ovsyannikova, dedicated to the neurophysiology of sleep, once turned the lecture hall into a real clinic. Immediately after the lecture, a group of 15-20 listeners lined up in front of the lecturer-physician, and the flow of questions, more personal than scientific, did not stop for about half an hour.
About the secrets of sleep - Ksenia Ovsyannikova, a neurologist from Kazan.
Roman Pereborshchikov says that the popularization of science, first of all, must be popular, otherwise it turns into intellectual snobbery. Therefore, science in the activities of the "Smoking Room" is part of entertainment program, with vibrant presentations and talented speakers. It is important to tell people about science, because otherwise a person “stagnates” in his ideas about the world and cannot adequately perceive the changes that are taking place.
I feel that young people are now really more interested in science. I think one of the reasons for this phenomenon is that the world around us is a world built by science. We perceive the present as the "future". This perception is also manifested in popular culture: films, serials, animation. The increased interest in science is a derivative of the achievements of this science, since we understand that without it our world will return to the Middle Ages. In Russia, by the way, this interest is fueled precisely by the medieval obscurantism that reigns in the laws and in the implanted Orthodoxy. Because of this, a huge number of young people are turning to science, as it personifies the freedom of thought.
Roman Pereborshchikov Head of the project "Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room"
Organizers of various popular science events often talk about the problem of a quickly reached "ceiling" in the number of audiences: the same people come to talk and listen to science, from time to time, from site to site. The format of the Gutenberg Smoking Room helps to engage a new audience in the conversation, which is driven not so much by a thirst for knowledge as by curiosity. This curiosity will make time for three half-hour lectures, especially if the event is promoted in social networks.
Lecture hall in Kazan. Alexander Granitsa, psychiatrist at the Clinical Psychiatric Hospital named after I. Bekhterev - about schizophrenia.
So, one of the most massive non-Moscow "Smoking Rooms" was held in September this year in St. Petersburg. Debating club
Participants of one of the largest Russian educational projects " Smoking room Gutenberg"plan to create the Gutenberg Foundation, aimed at the large-scale popularization of science in the Russian Federation and the CIS. To this end, the project organizers launched a crowd campaign on Planeta.ru. They plan to use all the funds raised to register the fund, implement existing programs and launch new ones, which will eventually form the fund's activities.
about the project
Members of the educational community plan to raise more than 1.5 million rubles and use them to provide branches with high-quality recording equipment, establish the first Russian Prize for bloggers who popularize science, the organization of a large-scale federal science festival "Science Volunteer Day", as well as for the registration of the Gutenberg Educational Foundation and the solution of its tasks. The community initiative has already been supported by such scientists and popularizers of science as Alexander Panchin, Asya Kazantseva, Alexander Sokolov, Stanislav Drobyshevsky, as well as bloggers Vitaly Egorov (“Green Cat”), Evgenia Timonova (“Everything is like animals”) and many others. Among the rewards donated by famous scientists and science journalists, you can find not only books and tickets to events, but also branded items, board games, excursions, comics from Obrazovach's pictures and a trip to a bar with the editor-in-chief N + 1.
About the fund
According to Roman Pereborshchikov, head of the Gutenberg Smoking Room project, the Gutenberg Foundation will provide organizational, methodological, financial and material support to developing popular science projects:
The general level of public awareness of the latest achievements of science, the degree of critical thinking of citizens and their ability to make informed choices in various life situations depend on the quantity and quality of popular science projects in Russia. We believe that science should be close and understandable to everyone, so we count on the support of society in achieving our educational goals.
Roman Pereborshchikov
About Gutenberg Smoking Room
The educational project Gutenberg Smoking Room, which appeared in 2014, develops several areas of educational activity at once. With the support of the AST publishing house, its participants established the Gutenberg Library series of scientific literature for young authors publishing for the first time; organized a network of free popular science lecture halls in 25 Russian cities; launched their own educational video channel with lectures; and created a program to support aspiring popular science video bloggers. One of them, Alexander Ivanov, the author of the channel " Chemistry is easy” recently received the Ministry of Education’s Loyalty to Science Award for the Best Popular Science Project on Social Networks.
The Gutenberg Smoking Room is a semi-private club where members exchange retellings of the most important non-fiction books in the format of short TED lectures. In an hour in the "Smoking Room" you can find out the contents of three important books, which will never reach your hands. For several years, "Smoking Room" has turned from kitchen conversations of RSUH graduates into one of the most interesting edutainment projects city, the creation of which did not require a single ruble. The Village spoke with the creator of Kurilka, Mikhail Yanovich, about who needs all this and how it works.
About the idea
There is such a book by McLuen, The Gutenberg Galaxy, which everyone must have read. It is about the fact that all knowledge, all the most interesting things are concentrated in the book and all the many books that printing press Gutenberg, forms a galaxy. I have always loved this metaphor.
When I was still in my final years at the Russian State Humanitarian University, I began to feel sick from fiction: I ate it. The only sort of books I could read at the time were either books about the profession (I took an accounting course to take over publishing from my father) or sci-fi and non-fiction. And immediately it became sad that there are a lot of books, it is impossible to read them all and at the same time it is difficult for autistic people to be alone with a book for a long time. And, of course, there is a difference when you read by yourself and when someone tells you something in a lively voice. What is told is remembered better and brighter.
Mikhail Yanovich
31 year
Education: Graduated from the Russian State Humanitarian University (Mark Blok Center for Historical Anthropology)
engaged in publishing, in 2011 he came up with the project " Smoking room Gutenberg»
Probably, the desire for interesting thoughts to sound out loud is common to all of us. Maybe it's from childhood - the love of sitting in the parents' kitchen when friends come to them and chat. Talking about books is generally such a kitchen story.
About smart girls
I don’t remember at all how we started making the “Smoking Room”. My friends and I were meeting at my house. I once suggested: "Guys, let's try to retell something, who read what and who remembers what." And it was unbearably shameful - I only later learned from one of the speakers of the "Smoking Room" such a phrase - second-handed confusion. This is when you feel embarrassed for your neighbor, he understands that you feel embarrassed for him, and you all begin to feel embarrassed.
I painfully experienced several such smoking rooms, but I did not refuse the idea and continued to persist. I began to think what the problem is. And then it became clear to me that everyone was retelling within the same scenario: some kind of formal retelling, some kind of financial statements, and not a story about their emotions. As a result, we have developed a recipe for the best retelling - this is when you retell the things that hooked you the most, which add up to a single story.
You feel embarrassed
for your neighbor he understands that you feel embarrassed for him,
and you all start to experience embarrassment
On the plasticity of the brain
and the birth of prison
In 2012, I read the book Brain Plasticity by Norman Doidge, and it became my book of the year. I was so overwhelmed by what I read that I couldn't keep it to myself. I realized that this is a book with a great aftereffect, after which you want to rush into the attack and which you need to retell. I turned to my friends bookstores, who had their own playgrounds, and Chitalkafe let us in.
We came up with the name “Gutenberg Smoking Room” and the slogan: “Read - retell. Life is short - there are many books. "Smoking room" - because, according to my impressions, at the university, the smoking room was the most effective space for personal growth. I didn’t smoke there as much as I talked: you listened to a lecture, there were five minutes of something interesting, and now you retell this to some parallel who didn’t hear it, mixing it with stories from your personal life.
To our horror, 70 people came to the Chitalkafe. How they found out about us is a mystery. Three retellings were announced. Two narrators came: I was talking about Brain Plasticity, and my friend Mischa Maizuls was talking about Michel Foucault's absolutely killer book Discipline and Punish about experiments with prisons and psychiatry. In general, I had a monstrous retelling (friends who came told me), but Misha saved the day.
After this time, a certain constant number of people who wanted to participate in smoking rooms appeared, and everything began to spin. Now smoking rooms are held extremely sporadically: once every three months or twice a month, and it depends solely on the enthusiasm of those who wish.
We are all so smart here - beautiful, interesting, in love,
a it turns out some kind of Soviet library
About format
We have two formats - a house party, when we just get drunk in a soft form at my place and get to know new people-speakers. Admission fee - short (5–10 minutes) retelling. And a large public smoking room, where we have three or four speakers, each of which is given 20 minutes for stand-up (with a stopwatch) and 10 minutes for questions.
You can choose any non-fiction book with some restrictions: we have banned everything about politics, religion and esotericism. We do not take politics, because all political conversations are inevitably confrontational - I do not see anything productive for myself in this. We also try to avoid books on psychology, because there are a lot of tendentious ones.
Most people come to business literature and just to psychology. A very predictable audience is going to these books - young marketers, PR people, guys starting their careers. If we talk about the scientific pope, then the most interesting retellings are obtained from a variety of graduate students or researchers.
One of the most interesting retellings was by Ilya Kolmanovsky. He talked about Edward Larson's book, based on the letters of Robert Falcon Scott, which he wrote from the South Pole, knowing that he was doomed. This is the story of such a very adventurous approach to generating scientific knowledge when the world is so interesting for a person that he is ready for trials and death for the sake of science. In the retelling of Ilya Kolmanovsky, it was amazing. Always excellent retellings on ethology, on animal behavior.
In my experience, the university the smoking room was the most efficient space for personal growth
About networking
We do not take money from visitors. “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is not about money at all. This is such a kind of club of interests, no matter how terrible it may sound. For me, "Kurilka" is networking, a way to gather a lot of interesting people. I would like, for example, Leonid Parfyonov to take it and come to us to retell some book that greatly impressed him. I really wonder what books have influenced people whose biographies are fascinating and who you admire.
While we do not have our own website, only
We talked with Zmitser Bylinovich, one of the organizers of the Minsk non-profit educational lecture hall Gutenberg Smoking Room, to find out how the project with scientific lectures became so popular and what to expect from it in Minsk.
The idea of a smoking room appeared among Moscow students - first in the format of a book club, - Zmiter tells us when we meet at the Ili club, where the second Minsk "Smoking room" will take place on Saturday. - Initially, the guys got together and discussed the science pop they read, like Hawking and Dawkins. But then Roman Pereborshchikov, the current ideological inspirer and head of Kurilok, looked in there and said that, guys, this is not a very interesting format, it’s worth shifting it to a lecture format. What was most surprising was that he was not sent, and the "Smoking Room" really quickly became a lecture hall when people are going to listen to three lectures for half an hour about life, the Universe and all that.
Lecturers, as a rule, are young scientists, junior and senior researchers, sometimes PhDs, and sometimes senior students. Each lecture is followed by a short discussion and the opportunity to ask questions, and the lecturers, instead of trying to present the material in detail and look at the paper, simply try to open the topic for the listener and encourage him to further study on his own. For a year and a half (largely thanks to the information support public "Educator") "Smoking rooms" appeared in 14 cities of Russia with more than a hundred events attended by 14,000 people. These smoking rooms featured a variety of topics: from the nature of schizophrenia to the conquest of space.
Topics can be very different - only any pseudoscience is excluded. And, of course, no one will set a goal to teach you how to take triple integrals, the goal is to interest, inspire you to do science yourself. And as a result, this format is in great demand - in Moscow, the non-profit Kurilka holds events at three venues at once: about culture together with the Gogol Museum, about space together with the Museum of Cosmonautics and about neurobiology and other topics at the site of the Moscow State Engineering University with a capacity of 500 people .
Zmiter himself is a second-year student of applied mathematics at Belarusian State University, and another organizer, Dmitry Grishchenko, is a geophysicist and editor of the "Physics of the Impossible" public. They learned about the “Smoking Room” while reading “Obrazovach”, and then responded to the call to organize lecture halls in their cities and thus assembled the first Minsk “Smoking Room”:
- The first "Smoking Room Gutenberg" was held at the Minsk Planetarium on February 13. The main problem was in the streaming broadcast due to the complexities of the planetary Internet. But we were very surprised and pleased by the number of people. We announced the event in the public “Tea with raspberry jam” and “Onliner”, and in half an hour all 120 people who can accommodate the Minsk planetarium registered. This time we settled on the new Ili club, as it can accommodate 120-150 people, and there will also be drinks and food during the break.
The second Minsk “Gutenberg Smoking Room” will be held on Saturday, March 12, at 16:00. It will include three half-hour lectures: Russian cosmonautics popularizer Vitaly Yegorov, known on the Internet as Zelenyikot, will talk about whether there is water on Mars, where and how to look for it. Geophysicist and co-organizer of the smoking room Dmitry Grishchenko will explain why Lake Vostok is unique and how its study helps to understand the history of the Earth and solar system, and biologist Alexey Shpak will talk about why bats are so special and what is the reason for their phenomenal longevity.
Registration for the smoking room is passing, but you can just look live broadcast of lectures. And since there will be many more “Smoking Rooms” in Minsk, so as not to miss them, you can subscribe to the public “