Crowd science – where masses of people participate in data collection for science projects – is growing, according to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rise-of-Crowd-Science/65707). Astronomy is the area in which crowd science has been most frequently used, which makes sense given the field’s massive scale and large datasets. One example is the ten-year old SETI@home project , in which people with Internet-connected home or office computers run a program in the background that analyzes signals from radio telescopes, searching for extraterrestrial life (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.php). Apparently, millions of computers have participated in this distributed science experiment. And then there is Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org), a project in which people help classify galaxies from Hubble Telescope images. Millions of galaxies have been classified by hundreds of thousands of people. Recently, I came across a biology project called Project Noah (Networked Organisms and Habitats http://www.networkedorganisms.com). In this project, people are invited to share images of the wild things they encounter in their everyday lives. It maps “spottings” on a Google map interface so users can get to know their local area through the eyes (and images) of others in the community. And then there is the Great Sunflower Project, (http://www.greatsunflower.org) which employs gardening volunteers in a large-scale bee-watching and tracking experiment. There’s even a Project Noah mobile app (of course there is!). Citizen trackers also helped out in the recent Gulf oil spill. And the list of projects like these is continuously growing.

All this led me to wonder how crowdsourcing (crowdsciencing?) might help us in the realm of science education, especially for the nonmajors who are typically either uninterested in science or outright scared of it. Crowdsourcing could be an excellent way to help students understand the complexities involved with drawing conclusions from raw data. As Carol Minton Morris, director of marketing and communications at DuraSpace, explains, instead of thinking about it as a data deluge, “How does “data renaissance” sound?” (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Growth-of-Citizen/65776).

Introductory science courses could have students take photographs of the insects or other wildlife they encounter, and then post and write about them on Project Noah’s website. Students could use their phones as cameras and learn more about their own habitats at the same time– even urban habitats (what, there’s wildlife in cities?). The classic entomology insect collection could be moved entirely online (sparing the lives of a few insects along the way) for easy viewing and sharing. I’m sure there are some instructors who are collecting and analyzing datasets, but how many are participating in these larger-scale projects? Seems like a cool idea to me. Genomics projects and GIS projects are two other areas where the data is ripe for student analysis. I’m sure there are more.

Do you have any experience with crowdsciencing in education? Do you know of others? What do you think about the idea?

Tags: crowd science, crowdsourcing, education, learning, science, STEM