[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

[Anya Kamenetz]

>>On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:13 PM, John Bell <john at novomancy.org> wrote:

So the question I'm left with is how to create incentives that go beyond
status in the internal community.  Can external incentives be used without
creating the equivalent of Warcraft gold farmers?  What would they be?

The concept of internal vs external incentives is a very interesting one in
this case.
When you're talking about learning& scholarship, as opposed to Amazon
reviews, you're talking about a community that extends beyond any particular
peer group on any particular platform. Academic disciplines are global in
scale and of relevance to humanity writ large (if they're not, then they
deserve to wither and die). Therefore there's a very strong existing organic
reputation based system for professional scholars: citation and peer review.
It's not internal to any one organization, though it is internal to each
discipline.

Here's an example, via Stian Haklev on Google Reader, of a couple of
different existing systems for representing the "score" of a particular
academic based on their citations:

http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2011/07/27/google-scholar-citations-researcher-profiles-and-why-we-need-an-open-bibliography/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+plos%2Fblogs%2Fmfenner+%28Blogs+-+Gobbledygook%29

So the question would be, to what extent is it feasible to represent a
similar type of score, based on references to their previous statements, for
amateur scholars? That would be an interesting example of an incentive
that's both internal and external.
a

ps  John Hopkins writes:

>>I believe that the embodied meatspace messiness of the
encounter of the Self with the (unknown) Other is the baseline for any
social
learning process...A community without any f-2-f component who attempts this
generation of relevant knowledge promulgates an increasing degree of deeply
operating alienation...

Perhaps if we were f-2-f I could understand what you're trying to say.
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