Citizen Science and Open Learning: A Twitter perspective

Abstract

Citizen science involves volunteers who participate in scientific research by collecting data or by addressing the needs of the project they are involved in. Citizen science creates a nexus between science and education that, when coupled with emerging technologies, expands the frontiers of research. Social networks, such as Twitter, are increasingly being investigated to capture online interactive participation, to be said, the degree of engagement of citizen science researchers with their projects. Although citizen science projects have been remarkably successful in advancing scientific knowledge, there is not really any evidence supporting that social networks act as learning tools and it is not even known whether the educational aspect is taken into account in citizen science projects. In this paper, we present a preliminary Twitter study where we analyse the conversation around education in the citizen science area. Although the results show that there is some talk around educational aspects, Twitter is not mainly used to support educational activities overall.