[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

[Jon Ippolito]

Thanks to Trebor Scholz and Caroline Buck for inviting my Still Water colleague John Bell and me to contribute to this discussion. This week we'd like to flip the Self / Community coin upside down to consider the community underpinnings necessary to promote DIY learning.

First our bios:

John Bell is a Web developer and data artist based in Maine. He has contributed to the development of The Pool, a system for fostering and documenting distributed creativity in digital arts; released several open-source web authoring tools; and given birth to an artificial intelligence that accidentally committed suicide.  Many of his projects focus on trust in online communities and maintaining intellectual integrity in environments where there are few consequences to ignoring it. His work has been featured in Wired online and he presented CodePlay at UMe at Ars Electronica's Electrolobby Kitchen in 2003. He holds an Intermedia MFA from the University of Maine and is currently a research fellow for the University's Still Water lab, working on the Variable Media Network's "Forging the Future" project.

I'm an artist, writer, and curator (http://three.org/ippolito/) who co-directs Still Water with Joline Blais. I see my career goal as building creative networks that can hold up to media monopolies (http://three.org/openart), accelerated obsolescence (http://variablemedia.net/), and co-optation by academia (http://thoughtmesh.net/).

With those introductions out of the way, I'm passing the ball to John to frame some questions about whether DIY education can be ramped up to the scale necessary for crowdsourced feedback, without degrading into lectures or mobocracy.

Looking forward!

jon 
______________________________
Still Water--what networks need to thrive.
http://still-water.net/