In this guest post, Frederico Sangati describes his interests ahead of Dev8eD, where he hopes to discuss crowd sourcing in education for science and “School-sourcing” (crowd sourcing in schools).

Sangati is a post-doc at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) based at the University of Edinburgh.

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Crowd sourcing technologies offer one of the most promising directions for collecting massive amount of structured data which is essential for advancing in many scientific disciplines. Some of the most successful examples are:

• Biology: Fold-it game – discovering how protein structures fold
• Astronomy: Galaxy ZooM – categorizing galaxies
• Natural Language Processing: Phrase Detective – finding relations between words

Building novel robust and successful crowd sourcing applications is not an easy task for academic researchers, as the majority are not web programming experts. We therefore foresee that in the near future more people from different disciplines will try to gather and build general crowd sourcing online platform in order to improve on visibility, robustness and reduce implementation time.

Although most of the crowd sourcing technologies are directed to a general public, we believe that time is ripe to start thinking of school-directed crowd sourcing solutions. This would offer a huge advance to the education system by providing a stimulating, fun, and collaborative learning environments for students of all levels of education to engage in, when doing their homework or familiarizing with science-related material.
We believe that this solution would bring students to feel more involved in the learning process as ‘active’ participants, as they will realize that their efforts will turn out to be useful for major discoveries in science, as all the collected data would be used in academic research.

We therefore believe that Dev8eD is an excellent venue to start preparing the ground for a change in the european/worldwide education system, which can greatly benefit from crowd sourcing technologies. It is also a unique opportunity to discuss how crowd sourcing solutions could serve as a bridge for connecting education in schools and academic research.

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Bookings for Dev8eD have now closed, but if you have an idea you would like to see worked on during the event, please add a comment to our Dev8eD ideas page.