Interfaces for collaboratively learning to identify species

Presenter: Dr. Nirwan Sharma (KMi, OU)

Abstract: In recent years, the number and scale of environmental citizen science programmes that involve lay people in scientific research have increased rapidly. Many of these initiatives are concerned with the recording and identification of species, processes which are increasingly mediated through digital interfaces. There is a growing need to understand the particular role of digital identification tools, both in generating scientific data and in supporting learning by lay people engaged in citizen science activities pertaining to biological recording communities. The design and development of these tools requires multidisciplinary perspectives and we utilise theoretical underpinnings from social sciences and education operationalised through Human-Computer interaction techniques applied and evaluated in the context of environmental science learning to develop these tools. In this talk I will focus on three types of learning techniques enabled through interactive interfaces which support species identification tasks in online communities i.e interfaces to support individual learning, collaborative learning and Human-AI collaborative learning.