Things have been busy at the WildLab lately, with the launch of the educational version of the application and curriculum into twelve NYC classrooms.

Also, the WildLab will now be known as “the WildLab Pro” as we re-design some aspects of the application.  If you have any features you would like us to include in our next release, let us know, and we will try to include them.

In the last version of the WildLab, we added Facebook sharing.  Now, you can share an interesting sighting on your Facebook profile.  We’re interested in finding out how many people are using this, and how to make such sharing more useful.  Are there other social networks you would like us to include?

Please join our Facebook fan page The WildLab Pro to keep up to date on the new release.  Also, please take a look at our page for the educational version, at The WildLab.  Students have already collected over 1000 sightings with our application!

As always, feel free to contact us with any issues or suggestions, and thanks for your support.

We are honored to announce that the MacArthur Foundation selected the WildLab as a winner of the 2009 Digital Media and Learning Competition, in the Innovation in Participatory Learning category. With the grant, we plan to engage students in collaborative citizen science projects that encourage local environmental stewardship and fit into their school curricula.

We will be developing an educational version of the WildLab, using iPhones as data collection devices. This version of the WildLab allows students to report their scientific observations to each other and to the larger scientific community. In the classroom, students can send their data to sponsoring institutions for analysis, posit their own questions, and develop their own line of inquiry based on their field experiences.

The Digital Media and Learning Competition, funded by a MacArthur grant to the University of California (Irvine) and to Duke University, is administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), a virtual network of learning institutions. The Competition is part of MacArthur’s $50 million digital media and learning initiative designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

We will be posting progress and news related to the grant here and in a new section of our Web site. Stay tuned!

Thanks goes out to the users who have given us feedback on the app.  We improved species entry with auto-complete (using species names from the American Ornithologists’ Union Check-list of North American Birds, 7th Edition).  We also added sorting to the species list, and now mark listings as “saved” or “unsaved”: that is, if the network becomes temporarily unavailable, the sighting is not saved to your database, hence, “unsaved”.  When you are at your desktop, you can always add such sightings via your WildLab account.

There are a number of other fixes too, and we continue to develop the Web site as we receive comments on how to make it more useful.  We’ve been enjoying the season here in New York, with migrants stopping in with frequency.  Happy Spring!