Abstract
This article summarizes the Citizen Cyberlab (CCL) Summit, which took place at University of Geneva on 17-18th September 2015, and introduces the special issue on “Learning and Creativity in Citizen Science”. As the final event of a 3-year EU FP7 CCL project, the Summit sought to disseminate project results and reflect on the issue of citizen science (CS) as a participatory environment where opportunities for self-development and various types of creativity can arise. A number of interesting themes emerged at the intersection of the work presented by project collaborators and external partners, including the different types of creativity that are evident in CS, the role of the community as the main medium for innovation and participant learning to occur, and the common challenges concerning the design, initiation and management of CS projects.The current issue presents work done during the CCL project, as well as external project contributions, for which the main focus is on learning and creativity in CS. The set of articles addresses diverse aspects of the topic, ranging from empirical research on the phenomena themselves, to tools, platforms and frameworks developed specifically for citizen cyberscience (CCS) with creativity and learning in mind, and distinct CS cases where these phenomena manifest in previously undescribed and unexpected ways. We hope that the issue will be useful to researchers and practitioners who aim to study, evaluate or design for learning and creativity in a range of CCS projects.
Highlights
We present the findings reported at the Citizen Cyberlab (CCL) Summit, the culmination of a European project focused primarily on exploring learning and creativity in citizen cyberscience (CCS)
In this article we summarize the findings and considerations shared during the CCL summit that includes work from the project, as well as contributions of external project partners
We introduce the diverse and informative compilation of articles that compose this special issue of Human Computation on Learning and Creativity in Citizen Science
Summary
We present the findings reported at the Citizen Cyberlab (CCL) Summit, the culmination of a European project focused primarily on exploring learning and creativity in citizen cyberscience (CCS). Though it is not too difficult to imagine that such informal learning could take place in participatory scientific activities (Bell et al, 2009), considering the highly individual, “patchy” and sometimes incidental nature of informal learning (Marsick & Watkins, 2001), measuring what and how citizen scientists learn has remained a challenge (Cronje et al, 2011). In addition to learning itself, CCS has been considered a potential ground for creativity, as participants are free to experiment, develop new ideas and problem-solving techniques and “think outside the box”, especially where scientists fail to do so (Dickinson, 2011). The 3-year CCL project aimed to fill the existing gap regarding understanding of what and how learning and creativity manifests in CS, focusing mainly on projects enabled by the Internet technology (CCS)
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