Help with flood of cultivated plants etc

[Chris Cheatle]

If anyone wants to practice identifying cultivated plants, students in Nova Scotia have conspired to add almost 10,000 records today (the province usually has about 100 per day).

Almost all are cultivated plants or captive animals.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2018-09-21&place_id=6853&subview=table

I've ben trying to do what I can, but I'm not even making a dent.

They don't appear to be assigned to projects, so I can't find a professor to send a note to.

[Charlie Hohn]

huh, wow yeah that is a lot. Too bad these giant efforts don't do more support for higher quality data. Pretty much all just two places in a city - not that it can't have value to do that, but having 600 people put in the same house plant is kinda pointless.

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Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[Chris Cheatle]

And the same horse, and the same cow, and the same sheep, and the same aquarium fish, and the same lobster. I could go on, but won't.

[bouteloua]

Ah, just found this: 

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/dalhousie-university-bioblitz

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/dalhousie-aquatic-ecology-2018-quiz-assignment?tab=about

"OBSERVE AS MANY SPECIES POSSIBLE. PRIZES AWARDED. ...RUBRIC: 

0 OBERVATIONS: 0/25 
5-25 OBSERVATIONS: 5/25 
25-50 OBSERVATIONS: 10/25 
50-99 OBSERVATIONS 15/25 
100+ OBSERVATIONS: 20/25 
200+ OBSERVATIONS: 25/25 PERFECT!!"

whoops

[Chris Cheatle]

Oh good, so if there are 170 students as the project suggests, and they all want a perfect mark, we are less than a third of the way there.

[Charlie Hohn]

wait the one project is set to only allow needs ID or casual observations? 

oof

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[Charlie Hohn]

" ITS OK IF YOU CAN'T IDENTIFY SPECIES, EXPERTS ONLINE WILL HELP IDENTIFY ANY PHOTOS UPLOADED.   "

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[Charlie Hohn]

this is where i get frustrated with the stated mission of 'iNaturalist is intended to connect people with nature so ALL people should use it Always Forever'. We need to cultivate an engaged and aware community who want to engage in a high quality way. If we just coerce people to add mass stuff without first engaging their interest and awareness of how things work, we will all get buried in this stuff.  Everyone should be able to use iNat, but there should be the expectation that people will put in some effort. If they don't want to, they can go back to Instagram. It's nothing against them, but this just isn't the place for literally every person. 

It worked better when we were aiming for power users, turbo-IDers, and a modest number each month of biology newbies who came here on their own accord not being assigned to do so.

Growth for growth's sake is never sustainable.

But i've given this rant before, blah blah

[Chris Cheatle]

If people wish to help in a slightly less frustrating way, what would be good is to actually search for and review observations from today from any of Canada's other 9 provinces or 3 territories.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing of this kind of stuff is that legitimate records are buried under 400 pages of this stuff on the identity pool and will get missed.

[bouteloua]

Charlie--yeah, see previous thread "Filtering out low-quality observations during identification" https://groups.google.com/d/msg/inaturalist/UWMoj5xMszU/XB6paW84CAAJ

[Charlie Hohn]

oh yeah i remember that one now, you can probably see me saying the exact same thing there... 

On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 9:50 PM bouteloua <cassi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Charlie--yeah, see previous thread "Filtering out low-quality observations during identification" https://groups.google.com/d/msg/inaturalist/UWMoj5xMszU/XB6paW84CAAJ

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[Mike Slater]

There is a good bit of this here in Pennsylvania this month. 

If I could contact the teachers, Id like to tell them to score the assignment like the spelling game Boggle, where you only get points for a word that you find and write down, if you spell correctly and no one else finds it. 

So my proposal would be students only get points if they submit pics good enough for a species ID and no one else gets that same species or at least that same individual. Also they must be marked as captive/cultivated if they are captive/cultivated.

Mike Slater

[Colin Purrington]

Has anyone contacted the person behind this project? I'm just curious whether people get feedback.

[Charlie Hohn]

It takes more effort for the person giving the class to actually look at all the observations so they rarely do. I know teachers are super busy but it’s crucial for them or people they recruit to do so. They need to scale the projects accordingly. And I’ll take this moment to again mention that we need separate account types for students. 

On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 7:45 AM Colin Purrington <colin.pu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Has anyone contacted the person behind this project? I'm just curious whether people get feedback.

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[Colin Purrington]

What pains me is that I bet many of these college and university teachers who assign these projects would be hugely valuable additions to the iNaturalist communities if they chose to engage. But these teachers probably only see the messy, un-useful, joyless aspect of forced student observations (that THEY CAUSED!) and thus subconsciously resolve to not become contributing members themselves.

Out of curiosity I glanced at several dozen iNaturalist-based projects on syllabi and many of them remind me of how some faculty use Turnitin.com to teach writing. An AI looks for similarities, makes suggestions, and teachers think their job is done. Makes me cringe.

Would be really nice to have a graph showing how many observations per day are forced. I know that's probably hard to do without a way to mark accounts as "student" but I think it would be a valuable metric to watch. At some threshold (yes?) it might be clear that something needs to be done to rebalance the system in some way.

[Charlie Hohn]

Same with the students. One or two stay on but most don’t come back. For those who come by their own choice (regardless of if students or not) retention is much higher. It’s kinda why I stopped hard pitching Inaturalist to people. I just show it to them and if they WANT to learn more I will teach them. 

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[Whitney Mattila]

Yeah, I don't think this is necessarily a symptom of iNat's own outreach efforts, or else the teacher would've realized it's not a band of experts, but a hodgepodge of people with varying degrees of knowledge. At least, I'd hope so, haha.

I'll see what I can do on the gardening side of things. I don't know what things would be native there, but I know my basic garden plants.

[Tony Iwane]

This is definitely frustrating. Everyone *should* be getting a link in their account confirmation email that goes to the Teacher's Guide, but apparently some teacher's don't see it, which is a bummer. Perhaps a link in the Start a Project page or something would be beneficial as well. 

Tony Iwne 

[Chris Vynbos]

Is there a way to accommodate these type of assignments without impacting on the normal running of the site? it's great that teachers are getting students observing the natural world around them (even if sometimes one feels there is a better way of setting the parameters). My immediate thought whenever I see people putting up test obs and pics of pets, or of their buddies with 'amusing' deliberate mis-IDs, is that iNat should have a sort of sandbox for all this stuff to sit in, where teachers and students can interact without any of it affecting the rest of the site. Only after a person has had a few research grade obs to their name will their observations become visible to the rest of the site. I suppose in a way 'casual' grade is just that, but casual grade is used for so many situations (e.g. not wild, no image, observer's choice) that it becomes rather amorphous and useful obs get lost in the mass of useless obs. 

[Ian Toal]

Are there any criteria for student projects? One may be organisms outside the campus/school site. Another may be make an attempt at identifying something beyond just "Something". If this is a learning exercise, a student should be able to recognise a flowering plant from a moth. Perhaps one of the criteria for using iNat as a project is that the students are expected to do some basic research. 

Ian

[Colin Meurk]

Yes, this often seems to happen when a new group first start using it - in NZ a sanctuary for charismatic endangered wildlife was visited by schools, and guides put them onto iNaturalist NZ to record what they see, and we got hundreds of pictures of iconic, captive takahe (flightless rail) and tuatara (only living dinosaur :-), and the odd selfie). but gradually we've trained the trainers (who were well-intentioned) to get the students to reach out to all the diversity in the park - wild and captive and blurred categories between, as the halo effect sets in and captive become wild. So i think we now have a better engaged young students.  It also requires a commitment and knowledge on the part of the class teachers - it is not just an easy baby-sitter! c 

[Aaron Carlson]

Along the lines of what Chris said, what is the feasibilty of adding another category of "Project" specifically, and exclusively, for schools, where the objective is simply to achieve a certain number of observations or species?

[Colin Purrington]

This would be fantastic. Maybe the category could be named "Class Project" to get attract attention of teachers. 

[Chris Cheatle]

If such a project type is created, hopefully it requires that contributes to be explictly listed (I have no sympathy if it takes time for the insrtuctor to enter this). It will be far too easy for an instructor to create a project that started collecting and hiding records from people not participating with broad filters.

On Friday, September 21, 2018 at 8:16:49 PM UTC-4, Chris Cheatle wrote: