InfoGroupB

Education, information and outreach

Tim Snow Leading

What is lacking & what is feasible

• An overview, a single resource providing a 'scattering 101' where users can go from no knowledge to some degree of competency

• Expectation handling, going from institution instruments, i.e. AFM, SEM, TEM, where results are visual and easily forthcoming to SAS

• Sample preparation best practices

• What's not possible!

Creating new instructional material

• No-one reads manuals!

• Videos (YouTube, etc.) are currently the favoured visual mechanism

• Simple phone/web apps that demonstrate/simulate simple x-ray patterns from simple scenarios, i.e. * Miller planes and diffraction from cubic symmetry

• Podcasts? Presence at student / general conferences

Aggregating existing instructional materials

• There's a whole treasure trove of resources from a variety of backgrounds/specialisations, i.e. * gisaxs.org or the NIST tutorials
• Perhaps on cansas.org we should aggregate these together
• Anticipating user requirements, perhaps a drill-down list would hone their literature/knowledge search, i.e.

 Is your sample solid / liquid: [liquid]
   Do you anticipate spheres or cylinders: [spheres]
     What kind of size range do you anticipate for your samples: [100 nm]
       Result: After acquiring data you should be looking into shape fitting using x, y, z piece of software using a sphere model, here's a list of resources to help: ...

Generating scientific case studies

• Pulling in previous point with drill-down list generate a number of common studies, i.e. 100 nm latex spheres, from 2D data to reduced data to result (almost, if not a complete, working example)
• Case studies incorporating multi-modal data analysis, using AFM/SEM/TEM results as inputs or constraints for fitting

NXcanSAS dissemination

• Users don't really care about the file format, as long as it works
• Make common software work with NXcanSAS
• If required, make software available to convert NXcanSAS to text

Development and maintenance of sasportal

• Should link to existing material
• New material, if not created elsewhere, should be hosted here
• Maintenance is difficult as people are reluctant to volunteer time...

Final thoughts

• Users will likely have other information, use this to inform experimental, data reduction and analytical constraints to work in harmony with this data, not SAXS gives size x, SANS size y and AFM size z.
• Use our websites to link to existing resources, identify holes in knowledge and either outsource or create the material needed
• Move away from reliance on written word/formula and embrace videos and interactive applications
• Drop-down list to aid sample data acquisition/analysis routes

• An enforced, first time scattering users 'safety' video to aid understanding of what scattering experiments are capable of/can provide