Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel, discovered the strange green "voorwerp" (Dutch for "object") in 2007. (Photo: NASA)

What does it mean to think scientifically?

If you asked me this question when I first moved back to New York three years ago, I’m quite positive I would have said something like, “What do I know? I’m not a scientist,” and pointed the questioner in the direction of the nearest pocket-protecting nerd in the vicinity.

Science was never one of my best subjects (I can still remember my high school physics teacher, Dr. Moroni, speeding out of the parking lot in his Pontiac Aztek to avoid telling me that I had failed the final exam). In fact, it was the very last thing I thought I would get involved in upon settling into my artsy Brooklyn neighborhood in 2008 to write my first novel. However, since my discovery of citizen science through the Earthwatch Institute and WildMetro, I now consider myself an unofficial member of the super hip NYC science community, whose events on such sexy topics as the dark matter and neuroscience are more likely to be full of trendy 30-somethings sipping beer out of plastic cups than pale, lab coat wearing individuals with microscope indentations around their eyes.

To begin a journey into the realm of the scientific mind, let’s go back in time about 177 years ago, when the word “scientist” first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary. Before this transitional moment in human history, people we would now think of as scientists were called “natural philosophers” – those who studied the workings of nature. Some of these philosophers, such as Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Michael Faraday, had little formal training in their chosen subjects, but came to learn about science through a personal desire to come up with answers to their individual questions about the universe. Science was less a profession or an academic field as it was a way of thinking about the world and understanding its mysteries through direct observation.

In some ways, the study of science was more accessible two hundred years ago than it is in today’s science classrooms, where students are typically tested on their ability to remember the answers to hundreds of questions that have already been answered, rather than being encouraged to look up at the sky or at a blade of grass and come up with questions of their own.

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The science blogging community gathered (in person) at the increasingly popular Science Online 2010 conference in Durham, N.C. this past weekend where I was invited to chat about Adult Science Literacy, Science in the Media, and Citizen Science. I had the chance to unveil this beta version of  Sci4cits to an enthusiastic reception from the science bloggers. They smiled, they tweeted, they blogged, and they provided lots of helpful suggestions. (We’re still seeking comments on this beta version and we’d love to hear from you.)

Some highlights from the session:

Science journalist Carl Zimmer substantiated the merits of citizen science and illustrated an example taking place in North Carolina…with dogs!

PLoS (Public Library of Science) biology editor Jonathan Eisen, who plans to launch a microbiology citizen science project, asked about unifying online data collection modules to enable researchers (and volunteers) to share information culled by citizen scientists. If you have ideas, let us know.

My co-presenters Scott Baker and Ben MacNeill shared their own experiences with citizen science projects:

Scott runs a Twitter-based reporting method to track fish catches. Now, through the wonder of Twitter, fishers log their catches and send the data to regulators–in real-time–using their cellphones.

Ben developed  Trixie Tracker, a data tracking web and phone app that allows parents to tease out patterns in their children’s sleep activity. Someday in the not-so-distant future, this information may be used by doctors and other scientists studying corollary trends (it could even be mashed-up with data now available from data.gov).  Maybe we’ll see a correlation between sleep habits and fish catches.

Pictured here are some of the Science Online 2010 speakers: Darlene Cavalier, Dr. Kiki Sanford, Rebecca Skloot, and Joanne Manaster. More reactions to the event can be found here, here and here.