Invited speaker for A!OLE Forum on December 8th, 2017:
Dr. Thomas Bartoschek, Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster (WWU)
Abstract: In recent years Citizen Science became a rapidly growing field although it is more than 100 years old. Due to emerging technologies, internet, smartphones and low-cost sensors more and more people get involved in citizen science projects and contribute with their (local) knowledge to questions, data or even publications. This trend meets the evolution of the educational sector which on the one hand starts integrating more and more technologies into learning and teaching practice in formal, but also non-formal education and on the other hand needs to foster STEM-education and scientific literacy to meet the needs of industry and science. This talk gives an overview of the international perspective on citizen science and digital learning and shows best practice in the intersection of these fields from the open citizen science project senseBox.
Bio: Thomas is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, where he is head of the GI@School lab. He holds a PhD and a diploma in geoinformatics and currently works at the spatial intelligence lab, where he leads the senseBox project. He is an expert in digital and spatial learning and his research interests are learning with geospatial technologies, citizen science and VGI. Thomas was a member of the semantic interoperability lab (MUSIL) at ifgi and worked for the Vespucci Initiative in the organization of the Vespucci Institutes for the Advancement of Geographic Information in Science. In 2013 he became a Vespucci fellow. His research, work and projects were awarded with several prizes, most recently with the CeBIT Innovation Award 2017 and the ACM Eugene Lawler Award 2013.
