I really like this site, so this critique is primarily praise, with a couple of comments and questions.

The numbers are really impressive. When you have 50,000 people submitting data over a one-week period, it means there is a lot of engagement with this site. In fact, if you look at today’s USA Today (June 16, 2005), there is an article called “How to See Every Bird on Earth” written by a person who is trying to bring his life list up to 7,000 birds. The article mentions that fifty to seventy million people in the United States are interested in birds. So in the sense that was talked about earlier during Chris Quintana’s presentation on constructivism, this site is an intellectual partner for those people.

There are a couple of interesting anecdotes I noticed while reviewing the site. One is that the Mayor of Gautier, Mississippi called on all citizens to submit their checklists, and they are at the top of the list of contributors, with something like one percent of all responses coming from this one town. However, the site does a reasonable job of adjusting the data to cover the broad geographic spread.

The site also has a seven-year track record, so this is a mature project and a mature piece of software that has incorporated what it has learned over time.

One of the features I particularly like is the way the bird checklists are connected to the Lab's “All About Birds” information [birds.cornell.edu/allaboutbirds]. For example, if I see a loon I may be wondering what kind of loon I’m seeing. From the bird checklist I click on “Common Loon” and can see information about that bird, including the sound. I can listen to it and see a spectrograph of the loon’s call.

This site has many good features. I think it helps people to learn science by doing science. Let’s say that you are interested in birds, but you’re not a fanatic. You do have a birdfeeder and you enjoy that, and you can identify a few birds. You hear about the Great Backyard Bird Count Project and say, “What the heck.” You log on and start playing around.

From the site’s welcome page you can click on various features, such as “Why count birds? “ You learn a little bit of information about that and learn about how to identify birds, and there are some wonderful things like how to choose a feeder, feeder placement, and so on.

You are still a little scared, though, because when you see your state checklist, you realize that there are 150 birds that you need to identify. But all of a sudden a bird comes along in your backyard and you haven’t seen it before, so your motivation is personal: What is that bird? And this information can help you through that process.

Then you jump ahead and it’s February, and you submit your checklist and click, in it goes. All of a sudden, you realize that you are part of an authentic science project. You are actually making a contribution to the scientists’ research.
 
What do scientists learn from this? You can look at survey highlights—what they call the top ten.
 
Let’s use the Common Redpoll as an example. In fact it’s a very interesting bird. The “poll” is like a hat—the red spot on its forehead. A few years ago my wife and I had a feeder, and all of a sudden on a cold winter day we saw a redpoll. We had never seen one before and we wondered, how on earth does this happen? Why are they here all of a sudden?
 
I discover that there are periodic irruptions of common redpolls every other year. The scientists went through the data from sightings and realized that there was actually a sequence—every other year the birds migrate south.

You can look at an animated map sequence that covers the count from the year 2000 to the year 2005, and you see an irruption of birds every other year.

I still don’t understand why the migration alternates every other year. Maybe it has something to do with freezing and crops. An increase in redpolls in even-numbered years doesn’t seem like a natural kind of sequence, but I can learn a little bit more about redpoll migration from the scientists.

The only way the scientists can know this information is by using your data. So here is the core premise: You are doing science. You are looking at those birds, developing your observation and identification skills, and diving deeper into bird behaviors and seasonal patterns. You have sent in your carefully prepared tally sheets to help the scientists. And you’re not just reading their findings—the scientists’ comments spark your curiosity even further. Now if we could just link into the “Great Backyard Hard Frost Count,” we could get a better handle on this frost and crops connection.

I think the real issue here is whether citizen-science partnerships really work at both science and learning. Sounds great, but what does it really mean? I think the real challenge the Lab faces is going that next step—moving the learning one step further to engage folks like me and you in the actual data analysis; not just reading what the scientists have figured out, but doing some of our own primary work with the data and the maps (in addition to supplying the underlying data). This is the really tricky part. The kinds of questions that the scientists can ask and answer are different from the kinds of questions that I can ask and answer as a citizen or a hobbyist. I can find out a little bit about these subtleties of the variation in the redpoll migration and get into that, but the deeper questions that are right for the scientists are not the right questions for me.

What I would be most interested in finding out is, what are the questions that these fifty to seventy
million amateur birders are truly interested in, and how can you get at that? Perhaps you could record which of the maps people are interested in, for example, the comparative maps of ravens and crows. Is there some way of getting at those interesting questions? And how do you provide the scaffolding to get people working with the maps and the data in ways that are interesting and relevant for them?

A few years ago there was a conference on citizen-scientists, what we called at that point “student and scientist partnerships.” The Cornell group presented early phases of their project at that time. I was one of the organizers of the conference, and I made a presentation about the need for a citizen-scientist project to have three things: It has to have real science, it has to have real learning, and it has to be a real partnership.

I think this site is an excellent example of succeeding at all three of those. The scientists really do want these data. You are really learning and engaging out of a personal interest, not because you are supposed to learn something via an assignment. And it is a partnership, because you couldn’t do it without this intellectual partnership with the Website, and the scientists couldn’t do it without you contributing the data.

I think this site is a winner. I wish I could find more fault with it! I had a little trouble finding out when and how to contribute data, because you have turned off those features right now due to the fact that you don’t want people contributing data until February, but those problems are really minor compared to the very positive reaction I had overall