Kloetzer, Laure

2016-1-1, Oula Abu, Amsha, Schneider, Daniel, Fernandez-Marquez, Jose Luis, Da Costa, Julien, Fuchs, Brian, Kloetzer, Laure

2016-1-1, Kloetzer, Laure, Schneider, Daniel, Da Costa, Julien

This paper focuses on an unexplored dimension of Citizen Science: the potential of Volunteer Computing (VC) for informal learning. VC has been one of the most popular forms of Citizen Science since its beginnings in 1997, when the first VC platforms, such as SETI@home, were created. Participation in VC is based on volunteers donating their idle computer resources to contribute to large-scale scientific research. So far, this has often been considered as a rather passive form of participation, compared to other online Citizen Science (or citizen cyberscience) projects, since volunteers are not involved in active data collection, data analysis or project definition. In this paper we present our research, which was conducted in 2013-2014 with the BOINC Community “Alliance Francophone”, and demonstrate that some of the volunteers in Distributed Computing research projects are not at all passive. We show that the dynamism of BOINC greatly relies on community-led gamification and that participation may lead to important learning outcomes. These include extending one’s scientific interests and network of people who share similar interests, and progressing within the fields of communication, computing and Internet literacy. Also, as demonstrated by our recent ILICS survey research (2015), these latest learning outcomes are experienced by all categories of participants according to their level of engagement irrespective of their level of formal education, which is an interesting finding for lifelong education policies. Altogether, VC projects engage volunteers emotionally, far beyond the simple use of their computer time and power, and may have a personal and educational value. For a minority of very active volunteers, these projects become real “Windows of Opportunity” for making friends, gaining skills and benefiting from new experiences, which would not easily happen otherwise in their normal everyday environment.