Personal Blogs

Picture Source: Keating, A (2014) ‘Bugscope Project lets students drive an electron microscope from class’ The Daily Illini – student newspaper online. Available at:  https://dailyillini.com/news/2014/04/28/bugscope-project-lets-students-drive-an-electron-microscope-from-class/

One of the last acts we were asked to perform in our first week of the H817 course was to review the article Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by authors Brown and Adler (2008).  The message of the article should have a strong resonance with anyone who is or who wants to become an open practitioner in their field, to inspire constructive learning and be part of a constructive learning community.  They point out that this represents a paradigm shift in our concept of learning on two fronts:  firstly from the Cartesian view of learning which sees learning as the gathering knowledge that is transferred from teacher to student (rather, knowledge can also be something that learners construct themselves in collaboration with each other as well as the teacher-guide).  Also, it represents a short-circuiting of the long process of first mastering a field of knowledge ("learning about") before one "learns to be” and becomes part of a community of practice.  As Brown and Adler (2008) write, since the advent of Web 1.0,  distributed virtual communities of practice have appeared, allowing participants to 'work together in a common space and peripherally participate' in each other's learning as well as benefiting from the help of '[an instructors' comments on and critiques of other students' projects'.  

They give several examples such as the now very well-established open-source communities, where anyone can become a software developer and the online "open source" encyclopedia, Wikipedia (Brown and Adler, 2008).  
Our task was to test the robustness of these innovations to survive and adapt in the 21st century by asking whether the project still running; whether further papers have been written since 2008 and whether the project we choose has been adopted by users other than those in the original institution where it was developed.  

I chose the project, bugscope, which was begun by the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois in 1999 with the idea of providing K-12 classrooms worldwide with remote online access to scanning electron microscope (SEM) via a web interface so that they can examine close up the bug specimens that they discover in their localities and send to the lab.  There have been many such projects aimed at K-12 students since.  Of course, my choice is driven by the area I work in now - K-12 academic English.  The subject (Biology) is not my specialism, but it is of many of my students and working alongside Biologists in a school, I can share all this information with them and both they and I can use it in the classroom (English for Specific Academic Purposes). 

A citizen science-type project, it was always intended to be adopted by users other than those in the institution where it was developed, and it has since conducted hundreds of sessions with schools around the world (1000 it appears at the last count).  The programme is still running and there were several articles were written about it up until 2011 and since then, quite a few articles have referred to bugscope as a good example of scientific outreach of its kind.  For example: Korb and Thakkar (2011); Robinson, Conway, Wallace, Ray, and Thakkar (2011); Manoharan (2017); Hedden and Zhao (2018). 

I found little using the Open University library. I found more by using key words searching Google and Google Scholar. The search 'K-12 Open Science' revealed this very useful source: Open Science Network.

The Unversity of Illinois also started the project Chickscope.  Its web site does not appear to have been updated since 1998 and it uses online MRI images rather than functioning remote-controlled hardware as its resource. 

Of course, there are many projects that have been taken up like this one, aimed at increasing the 'openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research' (Center for Open Science, 2020) in many different fields.   A blog may be a good place to learn about the projects that exist.  

Brown, S.J., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. Educause review, 43(1), 16-20. Online. Available at: 

Hedden, B., & Zhao, X. (2018, August). A Comprehensive Study on Bugs in Actor Systems. In Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Parallel Processing (pp. 1-9).
Korb, M. A., & Thakkar, U. (2011). Facilitating scientific investigations and training data scientists. Science, 333(6042), 534-535.
Manoharan, H. P. (2017). Simulation of Web-Based APIs for the Remote Operation of Bugscope.

Robinson, S., Conway, C., Wallace, C., Ray, A. M., & Thakkar, U. (2011). Bugscope: Online K–12 Microscopy Outreach. Microscopy Today, 19(2), 46-50.
States News Service (2011) "Science honors electron 'bugscope' project with spore award." Gale OneFile: News, https://link-gale-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/apps/doc/A262839679/STND?u=tou&sid=STND&xid=1460b297. Accessed 6 Feb. 2020.