Bringing Crowdlearning to School: How Can We Use CitizenScience Platforms to Promote Big Data Exploration in Science Education? Rivka Taub, University of Haifa, [email protected] Dani Ben-Zvi, University of Haifa, [email protected] Yael Kali, University of Haifa, [email protected] Abstract: The amount and diversity of information resources that are available in the Internet has rapidly grown over the past years along with the development of smart technological devices. Innovative tools provide access to data, enabling the organization and analysis of big data. This growth triggers educators to evaluate the relevance of some of the learning strategies commonly used in schools, such as learning a subject from a single teacher, usually referred to as an expert. This as opposed to crowdlearning, the process of learning from others through online social spaces, websites, and activities (Sharples et al., 2013). Our vision is to design, study and refine the learning of scientific and statistical concepts and strategies related to a complex interdisciplinary scientific phenomenon. In particular, learners will participate in a citizen-science project and will collect and analyze relevant big data. The setting of such learning will integrate characteristics of crowdlearning through a situatedlearning perspective, Future Learning Spaces (FLS), and exploratory data analysis. Keywords: big data, citizen science, crowdlearning, data science, exploratory data analysis, future learning spaces, situated learning. Introduction The amount and diversity of information and communication resources has rapidly grown over the past years along with the development of smart technological devices. One of the main characteristics of this development refers to users of the Internet and of the smart devices who can become active participants in creating, evaluating and revising information rather than only curating and using information created by others. Crowdsourcing is a method by which common people, not necessarily qualified with the scientific expertise, are called to solve a problem or carry out human intelligence tasks (Kazai, 2011). Tasks may be related to science—citizens’ science projects—or to other areas, such as business (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/) and music (Keup, 2011). Crowdsourcing projects may also provide citizens with the opportunity to engage in spontaneous and self-directed learning from the expertise and opinions of others, regarding innovative areas still being under exploration. Such learning is termed crowdlearning (Sharples et al., 2013). Several projects explicitly address crowdlearning and include educational activities that enable adult citizens or school students to take part in currently explored scientific issues. For example, MASH (http://alpha.projectmash.org/groups/citizen-science/) is a platform where students at different ages around the world participate in scientific inquiry projects by planning and carrying out investigations, asking questions, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, sharing and commenting on data. The projects deal with reptiles, galaxies, trees, and more. The platform also includes possible educational activities on the scientific concepts that the students are exposed to while handling the data. Another example is CloudSat (http://www.cloudsat.cira.colostate.edu/) where people contribute to NASA scientists by reporting on cloud observations. Their descriptions are later compared by scientists to pictures obtained from satellites. Additional instructional materials include information regarding various types of clouds, how they are generated, and possible effects on climate. Most of the instructional activities suggested in citizen-science projects focus either on learning scientific concepts or on simple data-analysis methods. None of them focus on more complicated analysis and inference methods of data science. We aim to develop such activities and study them. Crowdsourcing and crowdlearning are recently studied from different perspectives, most of them are related to the development of platforms and computational algorithms (e.g., Tarasowa, Khalili, Auer, & Unbehauen, 2013). Few studies explore crowdlearning from the perspectives of educational theories and strategies, and sociology (Oesterlund et al. 2014). Additionally, as much as crowdsourcing and crowdlearning are innovative and inspiring, their use in school settings is still rare. This is not surprising and is related to a phenomenon known as the school-society digital disconnect (Selwyn, 2006), that describes the gap students experience between their daily interactions, which are increasingly engulfed in mobile and networked technologies, while their in-school learning interactions are, in comparison, technologically impoverished. Furthermore, it becomes clear that schools sometimes fail to engage students in newly required strategies that are critical to the self-directed learning that characterizes crowdlearning, such as critical thinking, argumentation skills, scientific literacy, and statistical literacy (Gal, 2002). There is therefore a growing need to bridge this gap by designing curricula for a school-setting to support crowdlearning and data-based reasoning (Garfield & BenZvi, 2008) that would take advantage of current citizen-science public platforms and exploit their potential to enhance science education using exploratory data analysis (Shaughnessy, Garfield, & Greer, 1996) with an emphasis on big-data. Our vision Our vision is to create unique learning opportunities where crowdlearning is integrated into an interdisciplinary curriculum of science and statistics education. Our aim is to design and study students' learning of scientific and statistical concepts and ideas in an environment that supports crowdlearning and data-based reasoning of an interdisciplinary scientific area. This learning environment will resemble out-of-school crowd and data sciences authentic environments. In particular, it will be rich in appropriate learning technologies and enable spontaneous learning in an online community. To do so we plan to develop a technology-enhanced learning environment that uses a current crowdsourcing project with activities and a social infrastructure (Bielaczyc, 2006) designed to promote a learning community that collaboratively explores a scientific phenomenon. Design principles and theoretical background 1. 2. 3. The learning environment Big Data Citizen Science (BDCS) will address a complex scientific phenomenon, which will be studied through multidisciplinary lenses. Such lenses may be beneficial to enhance conceptual understanding and problem-solving abilities. For example, studies found that learning physics in the context of computer science promoted physics learning and enabled the students to transfer computer-science ideas to physics contexts (Taub et al., 2015; Taub, Armoni, & Ben-Ari, 2014). The learning environment BDCS will take place in several linked settings, of the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Future Learning Spaces (FLS) project. The FLS brings together cutting edge pedagogies and a continuum of collaborative technologies into a facility that is designed to support these purposes. This facility will be the hub that will streamline learning between various spaces, both within our facility and outside its physical boundaries into museums, homes, and networks around the world (Kali, Sagy, Kuflik, Mogilevsky, & Maayan-Fanar, 2014). The FLS will enable us to explore the learning taking place in environments that are in the continuum between ambient— naturally occurring—and designed ones (Kali et. al, 2015). The BDCS learning environment will be inspired by the situated learning perspective with a special focus on Socio Scientific Issues (SSI). Situated Learning refers to the nature of learning and knowing as strongly attached to the situation in which they occur. Studies show that students’ interest in school science declines over the years (Schreiner & Sjøberg, 2007) although they still value "real" science. Sadler (2009) claims that one of the main distinctions between school science and “real” science stems from the differences between the processes of knowledge acquisition. The theoretical perspective of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) aims to deal with the perceived distinction between school science and real science. This perspective views learning as taking place in a community of practice— a group of people who share a craft and/or a profession (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Situated-learningbased design seeks to engage learners into activities where they learn concepts and procedures in their authentic use, being a part of a community (Sadler, 2009). The students will engage in exploratory data analysis activities. The studied data is big, not only by size, but it varies in type (picture, audio, video, numbers, and text) and sources. Some data is collected by the learners themselves, and some is retrieved from external data bases, such as scientifically reliable sources (e.g., NASA's satellites pictures). The data-exploration activities will be inspired by the Connections pedagogical model (Ben-zvi, Aridor, Makar, & Bakker, 2012). In the Connections Project school students actively experience some of the processes involved in experts’ practice of data-based enquiry by working on data scenarios, investigated by peer collaboration and classroom discussions. Students generate and phrase the questions they wish to investigate, suggest hypotheses, collect and analyze data, interpret the results and draw inferences (Garfield & Ben-Zvi, 2009). A central feature of the Connections Project is the use of TinkerPlots (Konold, 2011), a statistical visualization tool that is designed to help students develop statistical reasoning by organizing their data (ordering, stacking, and separating data icons) and designing their own graphs. Expected contributions The proposed vision and project has both theoretical and practical significance. The results are expected to enrich theories of learning sciences, citizen science and data science by providing empirical evidence concerning their integration in a school setting. This is expected to lead to the creation of an innovative pedagogy / learning environment which will have considerable practical implications that will generalize across learning settings, and that may be used by both researchers and practitioners to foster citizen and data sciences within a wide range of learning environments. References Ben-zvi, D., Aridor, K., Makar, K., & Bakker, A. (2012). Students ’ emergent articulations of uncertainty while making informal statistical inferences, 44(7), 913–925. doi:10.1007/s11858-012-0420-3 Bielaczyc, K. (2006). Designing Social Infrastructure: Critical Issues in Creating Learning Environments With Technology. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(3), 301–329. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls1503_1 Garfield, J., & Ben-Zvi, D. (2009). Helping students develop statistical reasoning: Implementing a statistical reasoning learning environment. . Teaching Statistics, 31(3), 72–77. Kali, Y. et. al. (2015). Technology-Enhanced Learning Communities on a Continuum between Ambient to Designed: What Can We Learn by Synthesizing Multiple Research Perspectives? 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Kali, Y., Sagy, O., Kuflik, T., Mogilevsky, O., & Maayan-Fanar, E. (2014). Harnessing technology for promoting undergraduate art education: A novel model that streamlines learning between classroom, museum and home. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, Online First. Kazai, G. (2011). In Search of Quality in Crowdsourcing for Search Engine Evaluation. Advances in Information Retrieval Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6611, 165–176. Keup, J. F. (2011, January 1). Computer music composition using crowdsourcing and genetic algorithms. Nova Southeastern University. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2395339 Konold, C. (2011). TinkerPlotsTM: Dynamic data exploration. Emeryville, CA: Key Curriculum Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Learning in doing (Vol. 95). Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=CAVIOrW3vYAC&pgis=1 Oesterlund, C. S., Mugar, G., Jackson, C., Hassman, K. D., & Crowston, K. (2014). Socializing the Crowd: Learning to Talk in Citizen Science . In Academy of Management Proceedings(Vol. 2014, p. 16799). Sadler, T. (2009). Situated learning in science education: socio‐ scientific issues as contexts for practice. Studies in Science Education, 45(1), 1–42. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057260802681839 Schreiner, C., & Sjøberg, S. (2007). Science education and youth’s identity construction: Two incompatible projects? In D. Corrigan, J. Dillon, & R. Gunstone (Eds.), The re-emergence of values in science education (pp. 231–247). Rotterdam: Sense Publisher. Selwyn, N. (2006). Exploring the “digital disconnect” between net‐ savvy students and their schools. Learning, Media and Technology, 31(1), 5–17. doi:10.1080/17439880500515416 Sharples, M., McAndrew, P., Weller, M., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Hirst, T., & Gaved, M. (2013). Innovating pedagogy 2013: exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy maker. Shaughnessy, J. M., Garfield, J., & Greer, B. (1996). Data handling. In A. J. Bishop, K. Clements, C. Keitel, J. Kilpatrick, & C. Laborde (Eds.), International handbook of mathematics education (pp. 205–237). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. Tarasowa, D., Khalili, A., Auer, S., & Unbehauen, J. (2013). CrowdLearn: Crowd-sourcing the Creation of Highly-structured e-Learning Content.. CSEDU, 33–42. Taub, R., Armoni, M., Bagno, E., & Ben-ari, M. (n.d.). The Effect of Computer Science on Physics Learning in a Computational Science Environment. Computers & Education. Taub, R., Armoni, M., & Ben-Ari, M. (2014). Abstraction as a bridging concept between computer science and physics. In In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education (pp. 16– 19). Berlin Germany: ACM. Author Biographies Our common affiliation and its relation to crowdlearning. The authors of this proposal are affiliated with the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). By adopting a definition of learning as the co-creation of knowledge in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) communities, and by bringing together a cohort of expertise within the fields of education and the social sciences, the LINKS ICORE seeks to study the types of interaction, knowledge construction and social organization that: (a) occur spontaneously in technology-enhanced learning communities or (b) can be created by design of TEL. LINKS refers to these, respectively, as ambient, naturally occurring, environments, and designed environments. Specifically, in the context of crowdlearning, the authors of this proposal are interested in exploring how to adopt ambient learning characteristics into school settings, and how to adapt current school culture, to enable the adoption of ambient learning characteristics, such as crowdlearning, within future learning spaces (FLS). Rivka Taub is a postdoctoral fellow at the LINKS I-CORE, at the Technologies in Education Graduate Program, at the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa. Taub coordinated a science enrichment program for middle and high students and is a former high-school computer-science teacher. Taub earned her PhD from the Science Teaching Department in the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her dissertation dealt with interdisciplinary learning of computer science, physics and mathematics in a technologically rich context—a computationalscience course. Her main research interests are on the learning emerging in interdisciplinary settings, possible advantages and obstacles, and on ways to support such learning. Dani Ben-Zvi is a co director of the Future Learning Spaces (FLS) project at the LINKS I-CORE. Ben-Zvi’s research interests focus on two important aspects of human life: statistical reasoning and technology-enhanced learning. The first refers to the kind of thinking involved in creating and evaluating data-based claims that are used ubiquitously as means of forming credible arguments and of making decisions under uncertainty. All citizens need nowadays to be able to engage in this kind of thinking processes and have basic statistical literacy and numeracy skills. It should therefore be a standard ingredient of every learner's education. The second aspect, technology, is rapidly transforming the way people communicate and collaborate, consume information and create knowledge, learn and teach. Educational technologies can mediate and facilitate thinking about complex domains – such as statistics, mathematics or science, making them more accessible to all learners. Yael Kali is the director of the LINKS I-CORE, and an associate professor of technology-enhanced learning at the Technologies in Education Graduate Program, at the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa. Her work focuses on design, using a DBR approach, for supporting CSCL at various levels, from junior high school to higher education. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Instructional Science. Kali has been a faculty member at the Department of Education in Technology and Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology for seven years, and a Co-Principal Investigator at the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) centre, headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also served as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research on Computer Supported Learning & Cognition (CoCo) in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney.
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