The annual Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio) Event offers an opportunity for educators to engage students in the creation of research-ready data about the world’s biodiversity specimens. These specimens can be insects on pins, fish in jars, plants on sheets, fossils in drawers, and much more. This introduction will provide an overview of the kinds of data that can be created and its value in the classroom, including reference to existing classroom resources. In one example, a field botany class transcribes professionally produced labels followed by a discussion of the qualities of the best of them prior to embarking on student collecting and label creation. In another, a class creates geospatial data that is mapped as a launch into discussions about collecting bias and its implications for downstream analyses. The introduction will target undergraduate educators, but it will be potentially relevant for advanced high school settings as well. The introduction will conclude with a discussion of the merits of a WeDigBio classroom team challenge, where a productivity challenge is layered on the learning experience to add excitement. The team challenge has been prototyped the past two years between Florida State University and University of Florida but could be expanded to many additional schools.
Join us at 1:00pm ET on September 4th, 2020 on Zoom: https://ufl.zoom.us/j/9180420576.
