Date
Berlin, Germany | January 17th, 2018
Participants
Maria Daskolia, Veronica French, John Harlin, Laure Kloetzer, Chronis Kynigos, Julia Lorke, Greg Mannion, Gina Maskell, Luciano Massetti, Carlos Mauricio Diaz, Josep Perello, Marisa Ponti, Fermín Serrano Sanz, Advaith Siddharthan, Assaf Shwartz, Katrin Vohland, Arjen Wals, Silvia Winter
Purpose of the Workshop
There are very different approaches for citizen science, and a fragmented landscape of knowledge hubs. With this workshops options to develop a roadmap to consolidate and expand the knowledge base for participation and learning in citizen science should be explored.
Report
The workshop started with two presentations on the relevant topics and the assessment criteria of the upcoming H2020 calls and the next program called FP9 by Silvia Winter and Veronica French. The UN Sustainable development goals (SDGs) and living labs will be a special focus of FP9. The agreed that linking citizen science and sustainability, especially considering the SDG, would be an important part of a common research initiative.
As there are very different approaches for citizen science, there is a need to study options for consolidating and expanding the knowledge base for participation and learning in citizen science. The participants discussed the following challenges after an introduction by Laure Kloetzer:
- Heterogeneity (of fields/types of projects/goals)
- Inclusion (of different participants)
- Tensions between educational goals and scientific goals
- Evaluation: in comparable ways/longitudinal/with mixed-methods and multimodal methods
- Theoretical models of learning
- A critical view on Science
During the meeting a key point of discussion was about the objective and target of the proposal. There were different points of view on the following aspect: if the project should include citizen science projects that produce results in some domain, which should then be further evaluated for participation and learning effectiveness (synergies or tensions), or if it should focus on the evaluation of existing projects or on the impact of digital technology and gaming on human behaviour and the way of learning. The group agreed to choose local communities (urban and maybe rural) as the target of the proposal. Another topic raised was to test the effectiveness of citizen science projects with schools, which also target citizens in urban as well as rural areas. The question how researchers or initiators might be able to convey to students and people starting their research the idea that ‘citizen science’ tools can change their approach to scientific questions was also raised.
You can dowload the report here:
Contact
Laure Kloetzer (laure [dot] kloetzer [at] unine [dot] ch), Silvia Winter (silvia [dot] winter [at] boku [dot] ac [dot] at), and Katrin Vohland (katrin [dot] vohland [at] mfn-berlin [dot] de)