Keywords
Citizen science, informal learning, algorithms, automatization, education, privacy protection
Abstract
There is an increasing interest and growing practice in Citizen Science (CS) that goes along with the usage of websites for communication as well as for capturing and processing data and materials. From an educational perspective, it is expected that by integrating information about CS in a formal educational setting, it will inspire teachers to create learning activities. This is an interesting case for using bots to automate the process of data extraction from online CS platforms to better understand its use in educational contexts. Although this information is publicly available, it has to follow GDPR rules. This paper aims to explain (1) how CS communicates and is promoted on websites, (2) how web scraping methods and anonymization techniques have been designed, developed and applied to collect information from online sources and (3) how these data could be used for educational purposes. After the analysis of 72 websites, some of the results obtained show that only 24.8% includes detailed information about the CS project and 48.61% includes information about educational purposes or materials.
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Technical information
Received: 30-05-2022
Revised: 27-06-2022
Accepted: 19-07-2022
OnlineFirst: 30-10-2022
Publication date: 01-01-2023
Article revision time: 28 days | Average time revision issue 74: 40 days
Article acceptance time: 50 days | Average time of acceptance issue 74: 69 days
Preprint editing time: 171 days | Average editing time preprint issue 74: 194 days
Article editing time: 216 days | Average editing time issue 74: 239 days
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Cited by
Cites in Web of Science
Calvera-Isabal, M; Santos, P and Hernandez-Leo, D. Towards Citizen Science-Inspired Learning Activities: The Co-design of an Exploration Tool for Teachers Following a Human-Centred Design Approach INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2201554
Cites in Scopus
Calvera-Isabal, M., Santos, P., Hernández-Leo, D.. Towards Citizen Science-Inspired Learning Activities: The Co-design of an Exploration Tool for Teachers Following a Human-Centred Design Approach), International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, .
https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2201554
Miriam Calvera-Isabal, University of Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
