Tag Archive: education

Citizen Science Academy: Bunny Slippers optional

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March 5, 2013

March 5, 2013

Project Budburst participants observe plants at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Photo by Dennis Ward

Project Budburst participants observe plants at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Photo by Dennis Ward

When I first became involved in online professional development (PD) courses about 10 years ago, the casual approach to participation in terms of time and attire were often noted as desirable features. An often-touted advantage to online PD was that individuals could participate at 3 a.m. wearing pajamas and bunny slippers. Over the years, as the boon in online PD has expanded, I sometimes wonder if the sale of bunny slippers has kept pace with the expansion of online PD opportunities for educators.

Online education has gone mainstream, as evidenced by the large number of colleges and universities providing accredited online courses as part of their degree programs. Powerhouse universities like Stanford and Yale helped lead the way a few years back by offering their courses online and attracting hundreds of thousands of students. The widespread acceptance of top-notch universities provided an endorsement of sorts for the effectiveness of online education. The demand for online education continues to grow and this includes PD opportunities for educators.

Traditionally, PD for educators was synonymous with face-to-face classes, workshops, and seminars. Face-to-face PD, while valuable, is generally location- and time-limited which can exclude many educators who have other obligations or do not have flexible schedules outside of teaching due to family, extracurricular obligations, or other time constraints. Online PD courses that are self-paced are very appealing because individuals can chose when to participate based on their unique situation. One of the most appealing aspects of online PD is that it can be a great equalizer, providing PD for educators at all stages of their lives and careers.

As online PD has gained popularity, citizen science (CS) has also enjoyed a time of rapid growth. In recent years, CS programs and activities have proliferated, and many are Internet-based. Examples include Project BudBurst, Project Feederwatch, and The Great Sunflower Project. It is widely known that effective PD results in better implementation of programs and activities. In the case of CS, effective PD may also help with data quality.

CS programs that are entirely online — such as the NEON’ s Project BudBurst – may not have the opportunity to offer face-to-face PD or employ the old tried and true “Train the Trainer” model. We decided to test online PD using Project BudBurst and created our first course, Introduction to Plants and Climate Change for Educators. In January, 2012, we informally put out the word that we had a pilot online PD course for educators hoping to register about 15 people. Within a week, we had over 200 registrants and had to close registration as we could not meet demand. That is when it became clear that online PD was needed and that NEON could fill this important niche through the development of an online academy devoted to citizen science professional development – the NEON Citizen Science Academy (CSA).

NEON’s Citizen Science Academy Mission Statement: Provide online professional development resources for educators to support effective implementation of Citizen Science projects and activities that focus on ecology and environmental sciences.

The NEON CSA is intended to be a complete online PD resource for educators and will include online courses, modules, tutorials, and a virtual community of practice. Initially, I had been concerned that sharing and communication, a hallmark of face-to-face PD, would be sacrificed for the convenience of online courses. I have been pleasantly surprised to observe the exchange of ideas and thoughts in our virtual classrooms via discussion forums. Perhaps wearing bunny slippers encourages these informal exchanges.

Educators practice making Project BudBurst observations during a workshop in Boulder, CO. Photo by Sarah Newman

Educators practice making Project BudBurst observations during a workshop in Boulder, CO. Photo by Sarah Newman

As CSA develops, we intend to partner with other online CS programs and partner to offer a full suite of online courses and resources that support all aspects of CS for educators. Further, through a partnership with the National Geographic FieldScope program, CSA will also include innovative, free online mapping, analysis and data visualization tools that facilitate data analysis.

In the case of Project BudBurst, we now offer several courses for a wide variety of educators. One of our educators used her online PD participation to write a successful grant to engage her students in making observations of trees in their schoolyard. Another educator shared her efforts to have students in her art class take photos of plants as the seasons change. Several informal educators have designed exhibits and displays that feature Project BudBurst.

We hope you will join the growing CSA community by signing up for one of our online courses (citizenscienceacademy.org). Bunny slippers optional.

This post originally appeared on the SciStarter blog and has been re-posted here and on the PLoS Citizen Sci blog under this Creative Commons license:

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Citizen Science Academy: Bunny Slippers Optional by is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Finding my people (your people?) at ScienceOnline

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February 21, 2013

February 21, 2013

For four breathless, hyper-social days at the beginning of February, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, arguing, brainstorming, cheering and dining with more than 400 other people who care a ridiculous amount about the same things I care about. We were there to learn about, share and lead efforts to make science the best it can be. We were there to persuade the rest of society to take an interest in science, use science to inform their decisions, even do science themselves. We considered ourselves lucky to be gathered at the core gathering of an unconference that never really ends and a community that never stops conversing. This unconference and this community are both called ScienceOnline.

The concentration of knowledge, generosity and enthusiasm at the unconference has spawned countless collaborations and mentorships across science and science communication – as well as things I’d never have imagined would ever be done or that I would ever do. There are people at ScienceOnline meetings who want to measure the impact of their communication and outreach efforts, assemble all the best science multimedia on the web, collaborate with artists to reach a different audience in different ways, overhaul scientific peer review, visualize data, and kill the science deficit model, among other things. So for me, going to ScienceOnline was about finding and connecting with my people. And boy, did it work like gangbusters.

For instance, at ScienceOnline2012 I met paleoecologist @JacquelynGill, and we went on to put together a social media training that we piloted at the ESA annual meeting and took all the way to the National Science Foundation. But just because I helped lead a session on social media doesn’t mean I know everything there is to know about it. I’d been using Twitter on behalf of various science institutions since 2010, but I didn’t really understand how powerful it could be until I saw how people at ScienceOnline2012 used it. In fact, I have to attribute the growth of NEON’s social media presence (which I manage) to knowledge and experience that was openly shared by the people I met at ScienceOnline and by members of their own online networks – who have since become part of my network, too.

Better social media use, in turn, introduced me to a wealth of tools and information that have opened up my world and completely reshaped my skills and perspective on science and science communication. I have learned so much about the science and culture of ecology from people whom I follow on Twitter and who generously share their best finds and insights with whoever’s listening. I have learned from them which tools I need to master to build my data visualization skills and my statistical savvy. This year, at ScienceOnline2013, I took an R data visualization workshop, picked up a million more ideas and met dozens more people I’d like to work and play with in the future. And I sang along to a hip-hop song about evolution:

You might hear “unconference,” “ScienceOnline,” and “social media” and assume that I spent four days typing and texting away at a bunch of other techno-hipsters. On the contrary, I hardly used Twitter at all while I was at the meeting, because nearly everyone I wanted to talk to and share with was right there with me.

Bora Zivkovic, the editor – or “blogfather” – of the Scientific American blog network and a co-founder of ScienceOnline, explains in an elegant and eloquent post how he and co-organizers designed the unconference to encourage people to talk and connect face-to-face. They’ve wildly succeeded in creating a meeting that’s more interactive, exciting and productive than any scientific or science writing meeting I’ve ever attended.

The schedule includes half-hour breaks between each session and a huge, comfortable lounge with games and snacks to encourage people to talk and interact. Attendance is capped at 450 people because the organizers want to keep the meeting small enough that everyone talks to each other. And every year, there is a mad rush to register for those slots that ends within minutes. The sessions themselves don’t look like typical professional meeting presentations or even panel discussions. There are no posters (other than the incredible sketch notes some people create at sessions), session leaders don’t lecture to Powerpoint slides and audience members don’t just sit passively and listen. Instead, session leaders ask questions to help spark and guide discussion and make sure the microphones get around to everyone who has something to say. The discussions themselves are rich with challenging, supportive, thoughtful and hilarious comments, made in-person and on Twitter and in blog posts that summarize and respond to what happened in the room and on Twitter.

I’m proud to report that I was a serious part of the discussion this year. I have always found scientific conferences a scary place to speak up. As a graduate student and then as a newbie science journalist, I was constantly fighting the sense that I was a nobody who would be judged or dismissed for having a stupid question or misunderstanding the speaker.

ScienceOnline nametags have no affiliations or titles on them. I got into discussions with several people who would have intimidated me if I’d known who they were before I started talking.

ScienceOnline nametags have no affiliations or titles on them. I got into discussions with several people who would have intimidated me if I’d known who they were before I started talking.

But at ScienceOnline there was always the sense that I could just jump right in. Nametags had no affiliations or titles on them, and I engaged in intense discussions with several people who would have intimidated me if I’d known who they were before I started talking. I ended up talking to scientists, journalists, writers, artists, educators, software developers, students, filmmakers, and academic librarians, many of whom are quite well known in their fields.

Did I mention that this unconference never really ends? The unconference sessions for ScienceOnline 2014 are already being proposed and organized on a wiki that went up during the 2013 meeting. Blogging and tweeting about ScienceOnline happens all year round – you can see the tweets if you search for Twitter for #scio13 and #scio14. One tweet may not say much, but through the magic of hashtags and Storify, several of them from a session or topic can be collated to tell a much longer story. Storifies and blogposts continue to spark and inform discussion long after the unconference is over. This year, ScienceOnline also videotaped and live streamed several of the unconference sessions, so that people around the world could gather to watch and weigh in on the discussions that happened in Raleigh. With so manysocial media-savvy people in the room at all times, nearly everything we said or did was captured, summarized, and shared publicly on the Internet during or after the fact.

That amount of openness and documentation may sound scary – but it’s been invigorating for me. I think those who created NEON must have valued transparency and documentation like this, but they didn’t have social media tools at the ready to help them crowdsource the generation of documentation and open up the discussion to more remote participants and participants after the fact. The general feeling in the online science community seems to be that we have found some really great things that we want to share with as many people as possible so everyone can benefit. NEON’s community will be able to do the same as more of us learn more about how to best utilize online tools for communication and collaboration.

I’m convinced that this combination of openness and generosity is the glue that holds together and strengthens the online science community. It’s grown into a collaborative superorganism that can self-assemble inspired, talented teams to tackle whatever challenges it finds. I’m fascinated and excited to watch this change in approach and attitude ripple through various parts of the science community now. NEON, for instance, has more than doubled the size of its scientist Twitter following in the past year. Like science social media guru Christie Wilcox, I’m finding that more scientists, educators and journalists are asking me not why they should use social media, but how they can use it. They are all part of the greater ScienceOnline community, whether they have been to the unconference or not. I hope that more scientists and science lovers find this vibrant online community and that it leads them to as much mentorship, collaboration and inspiration as I have found.

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Looking to climate science for ways to deal with data overload

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November 4, 2011

November 4, 2011

Large science conferences are usually a science smorgasbord for a knowledge junkie like myself. But I showed up at the World Climate Research Program Open Science Meeting in Denver with a time limit and tunnel vision. I focused on how scientists, policymakers and educators might make more and better use of large data sets – and even participate in generating them. You see, I and my colleagues in the education/outreach and cyberinfrastructure departments at NEON are fixing to develop a web portal for NEON data that makes the data accessible in more than one sense of the word. We are trying to design tools that make it relatively easy for you to find both the data you want and/or the meaning in the data (if there is any). To my surprise and delight, I found at WCRP that related efforts are taking place at institutions right in Boulder. I dove into a broad, deep pool of international climate science and cultural diversity at WCRP and ended up talking almost entirely with people who work more or less down the street from me.

Data rods, a project by the NSIDC, organizes remote sensing data into spatially gridded time series in a pure-object database, facilitating faster data analysis and query across space and time.

Data rods, a project at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, organizes remote sensing data into spatially gridded time series in a pure-object database, facilitating faster data analysis and query across space and time.

For example, the first poster in the Tuesday morning session that caught my eye was about the Data Rods project from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. A huge quantity of remote sensing data exists that was collected by different instruments in different formats at different spatial scales over several decades. Some satellite data exists only as image files. It’s incredibly time-consuming to search and analyze those files across both space and time using relational databases.

Converting spatially referenced data into data rods, as David Gallaher explained to me, make it many times faster to assess changes in a specific location over time. NEON will be monitoring the same locations over 30 years with georeferenced sampling and remote sensing, and much of NEON’s data could be converted into data rods for simultaneous analysis across both space and time. For example, with satellite images, the data rod system takes whatever spatial reference information is available about each image and lines up the image pixels inside a spatial grid, where each grid cell corresponds to a specific location on Earth. Each gridded pixel is like a page in a flipbook: as you add pages from other images taken at different times, you end up with a story about how that location changed over time – a data rod.

Hard to tell the difference between ice and clouds in this image. They're both white blobs. That is, until you use a time series of images like these to calculate how fast each white blob is moving.

Hard to tell the difference between ice and clouds in this image. They’re both white blobs. That is, until you use a time series of images like these to calculate how fast each white blob is moving.

Convert old satellite images of the Arctic into data rods, and it’s a relatively quick computational task to sort out clouds from ice sheets, Gallaher told me. Clouds and ice are both white, but clouds move faster, and data rods will conveniently animate those different rates of movement in a way that’s easy to detect with a computer algorithm. Differentiating between the ice and clouds is key to estimating historical ice cover and describing the impacts of climate change. Scientists, what could you do faster and more efficiently with old or modern environmental data stored this way?

A replica of the HMS Plover thermometer shelter, built to historic specs.
Very old instructions.

(top) A replica of the HMS Plover thermometer shelter, built to historic specs (bottom).

Speaking of teaching old data new tricks, I’m a big fan for the Old Weather project, a cleverly designed citizen science effort to transcribe a trove of historical weather and ice information embedded in old weather logs. A core problem with this data is that it was not all collected in the same way, and can’t be compared directly with modern data without correcting for the biases introduced by collection methods. Because these data were collected so long ago, scientists don’t know exactly how they’re biased are.

But some researchers and high school students in New York and Alaska have followed some very old directions to re-create the thermometer shelter used by the HMS Plover to take hourly air temperature measurements in Point Barrow, Alaska back in the mid-19th century. The replica thermometer shelter is now at the NOAA Barrow Observatory, where it will collect a year’s worth of data that the students will use to estimate the temperature biases introduced by the shelter into the temperature record. I’m looking forward to seeing these students present their results at a future conference, and I’m filing away this project in my brain for retrieval when NEON is ready to develop new programs in its citizen science arm.

Dr. Cunningham and his poster.

Dr. Cunningham and his poster.

Finally, the exception to my tour of local science was a poster by a fellow named Keith Cunningham, who hails from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His poster was about the use of remote sensing data to audit carbon markets. For example, the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation program has set up a carbon market in developing countries by assigning value to the carbon stored in forests and giving the countries financial incentives to manage forests and development in ways that don’t release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. UN-REDD is having countries measure their own carbon storage. But Cunningham argues that as in other markets, a third party auditor needs to step in to help keep countries accountable for the carbon they are or aren’t storing. That’s where remote sensing science comes in.

NEON will collect much of the kind of biomass data that could be used to audit carbon markets. None of that data will be in areas where a carbon market currently applies, but some of the knowledge and methodology NEON generates about collecting and analyzing biomass data at different spatial scales may end up influencing carbon accounting sooner or later. In the thick of getting the observatory up and running, it’s easy to forget that NEON data products and tools could affect decisions in the policy and regulation world that will affect the lives and livelihoods of millions or even billions of people, decades into the future.

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.neonnotes.org/2011/11/looking-to-climate-science-for-ways-to-deal-with-data-overload/