Teacher's resources. Democracy in action ; Global concerns ; Media matters ; The citizen and the law ; Human rights.

Este recurso ayuda al profesor a explicar el contenido de la materia de Educación para la Ciudadanía a los alumnos de la etapa 4 del curriculo nacional inglés (key stage 4) y del General Certificate Secondary Education (GCSE). Dispone de actividades fotocopiables que apoyan y complementan a los cinco libros del estudiante; también incorpora fuentes adicionales de información para fomentar en los estudiantes habilidades de investigación.

Birding 2.0: Citizen Science and Effective Monitoring in the Web 2.0 World

The amateur birding community has a long and proud tradition of contributing to bird surveys and bird atlases. Coordinated activities such as Breeding Bird Atlases and the Christmas Bird Count are examples of "citizen science" projects. With the advent of technology, Web 2.0 sites such as eBird have been developed to facilitate online sharing of data and thus increase the potential for real-time monitoring. However, as recently articulated in an editorial in this journal and elsewhere, monitoring is best served when based on a priori hypotheses. Harnessing citizen scientists to collect data following a hypothetico-deductive approach carries challenges. Moreover, the use of citizen science in scientific and monitoring studies has raised issues of data accuracy and quality. These issues are compounded when data collection moves into the Web 2.0 world. An examination of the literature from social geography on the concept of "citizen sensors" and volunteered geographic information (VGI) yields thoughtful reflections on the challenges of data quality/data accuracy when applying information from citizen sensors to research and management questions. VGI has been harnessed in a number of contexts, including for environmental and ecological monitoring activities. Here, I argue that conceptualizing a monitoring project as an experiment following the scientific method can further contribute to the use of VGI. I show how principles of experimental design can be applied to monitoring projects to better control for data quality of VGI. This includes suggestions for how citizen sensors can be harnessed to address issues of experimental controls and how to design monitoring projects to increase randomization and replication of sampled data, hence increasing scientific reliability and statistical power.

Short-eared Owl (Asio flammeus) surveys in the North American Intermountain West: utilizing citizen scientists to conduct monitoring across a broad geographic scale

The Short-eared Owl (Asio flammeus) is an open-country species breeding in the northern United States and Canada, and has likely experienced a long-term, range-wide, and substantial decline. However, the cause and magnitude of the decline is not well understood. We set forth to address the first two of six previously proposed conservation priorities to be addressed for this species: (1) better define habitat use and (2) improve population monitoring. We recruited 131 volunteers to survey over 6.2 million ha within the state of Idaho for Short-eared Owls during the 2015 breeding season. We surveyed 75 transects, 71 of which were surveyed twice, and detected Short-eared Owls on 27 transects. We performed multiscale occupancy modeling to identify habitat associations, and performed multiscale abundance modeling to generate a state-wide population estimate. Our results suggest that within the state of Idaho, Short-eared Owls are more often found in areas with marshland or riparian habitat or areas with greater amounts of sagebrush habitat at the 1750 ha transect scale. At the 50 ha point scale, Short-eared Owls tend to associate positively with fallow and bare dirt agricultural land and negatively with grassland. Cropland was not chosen at the broader transect scale suggesting that Short-eared Owls may prefer more heterogeneous landscapes. On the surface our results may seem contradictory to the presumed land use by a “grassland” species; however, the grasslands of the Intermountain West, consisting largely of invasive cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), lack the complex structure shown to be preferred by these owls. We suggest the local adaptation to agriculture represents the next best habitat to their historical native habitat preferences. Regardless, we have confirmed regional differences that should be considered in conservation planning for this species. Last, our results demonstrate the feasibility, efficiency, and effectiveness of utilizing public participation in scientific research to achieve a robust sampling methodology across the broad geography of the Intermountain West.

A conceptual life event framework for government-to-citizen electronic service provision

In recent years, life event approach has been widely used by governments all over the world for designing and providing web services to citizens through their e-government portals. Despite the wide usage of this approach, there is still a challenge of how to use this approach to design e-government portals in order to automatically provide personalised services to citizens. We propose a conceptual framework for e-government service provision based on life event approach and the use of citizen profile to capture the citizen needs, since the process of finding Web services from a government-to-citizen (G2C) system involves understanding the citizens’ needs and demands, selecting the relevant services, and delivering services that matches the requirements. The proposed framework that incorporates the citizen profile is based on three components that complement each other, namely, anticipatory life events, non-anticipatory life events and recurring services.

The role of the consumer-citizen in environmental protest in the 1990s

This paper links market‐based ‘protest’ strategies, as used recently by environmental protest groups and other sociations, to citizenship theory, seeking to open a debate about the role of the consumer‐citizen. It is suggested that such consumer‐citizenship, whereby protest and political action are encouraged through market mechanisms, and limited through state action, is an important feature of late‐modernity. The paper seeks to illustrate how advanced capitalist societies are producing reworked forms of rights relationships. This is discussed within the context of the rhetoric of ‘active’ citizenship as used in UK politics and through examples of recent environmental protests and other consumer‐citizen strategies.

‘Did Ronald McDonald also tend to scare you as a child?’: working to emplace consumption, commodities, and citizen-students in a large classroom setting

So-called ‘radical’ and ‘critical’ pedagogy seems to be everywhere these days on the landscapes of geographical teaching praxis and theory. Part of the remit of radical/critical pedagogy involves a de-centring of the traditional ‘banking’ method of pedagogical praxis. Yet, how do we challenge this ‘banking’ model of knowledge transmission in both a large-class setting and around the topic of commodity geographies where the banking model of information transfer still holds sway? This paper presents a theoretically and pedagogically driven argument, as well as a series of practical teaching ‘techniques’ and tools—mind-mapping and group work—designed to promote ‘deep learning’ and a progressive political potential in a first-year large-scale geography course centred around lectures on the Geographies of Consumption and Material Culture. Here students are not only asked to place themselves within and without the academic materials and other media but are urged to make intimate connections between themselves and their own consumptive acts and the commodity networks in which they are enmeshed. Thus, perhaps pedagogy needs to be emplaced firmly within the realms of research practice rather than as simply the transference of research findings.

The Solar Stormwatch CME catalogue: results from the first space weather citizen science project

Solar Stormwatch was the first space weather citizen science project, the aim of which was to identify and track coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed by the Heliospheric Imagers aboard the STEREO satellites. The project has now been running for approximately 4 years, with input from >16000 citizen scientists, resulting in a dataset of >38000 time-elongation profiles of CME trajectories, observed over 18 pre-selected position angles. We present our method for reducing this data set into aCME catalogue. The resulting catalogue consists of 144 CMEs over the period January-2007 to February-2010, of which 110 were observed by STEREO-A and 77 were observed by STEREO-B. For each CME, the time-elongation profiles generated by the citizen scientists are averaged into a consensus profile along each position angle that the event was tracked. We consider this catalogue to be unique, being at present the only citizen science generated CME catalogue, tracking CMEs over an elongation range of 4 degrees out to a maximum of approximately 70 degrees. Using single spacecraft fitting techniques, we estimate the speed, direction, solar source region and latitudinal width of each CME. This shows that, at present, the Solar Stormwatch catalogue (which covers only solar minimum years) contains almost exclusively slow CMEs, with a mean speed of approximately 350 kms−1. The full catalogue is available for public access at www.met.reading.ac.uk/spate/stormwatch. This includes, for each event, the unprocessed time-elongation profiles generated by Solar Stormwatch, the consensus time-elongation profiles and a set of summary plots, as well as the estimated CME properties.