[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

Wed Sep 7 18:56:44 UTC 2011

Brian,
doesn't your participation on this email list violate your orthodoxy of the
skin-to-skin holy transmission of knowledge?
a

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Brian Holmes
<bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com>wrote:

> This is a timely subject just as public education is getting axed all
> over the world. It will be the final victory of the bosses: without
> books, without attention span, without ideas except those piped in by
> the media and above all without others, control will be complete.
>
> You'll get the source without the crowd, perfect sterility.
>
> I submit that the chance to escape from total fear and submission
> depends on having some contact to another speaking body in the room.
>
> But probably the apolitical designer types can get two or three weeks
> work making edu-sites for future capitalist game robots!
>
> good luck, BH
>
> On 09/06/2011 11:13 AM, John Bell wrote:
> > Yes, I think identifying and distinguishing types of peers is an
> > important aspect of the kind of system I'm talking about.  The part
> > that's problematic is--without falling back on external validation
> > like degrees and academic positions--figuring out which people are
> > which type, and what the scope of the types are.  For example, I just
> > did something similar for a proposal as part of the
> > Mozilla+Journalism project where I was trying to identify commenters
> > with expertise in different fields so they could add annotation to
> > mass media articles.  In that system a commenter could claim a level
> > of expertise when they made a comment and a trust metric would adjust
> > their long-term credibility based on how other users rate that
> > comment.  It's a refinement of the old Slashdot karma model, but one
> > that seems useful in this situation.
> >
> > (http://www.nmdjohn.com/2011/08/05/moznewslab-week-4-pitching-reposte/
> > if anybody is curious.)
> >
> > But I think there are limits to how much participation can be
> > incentivized without ending up back at cash, which I suspect
> > introduces its own problems.  Look at the situation with Wikipedia
> > where they rewarded participation by turning users into bureaucrats,
> > creating a system that's often accused of being petty and detrimental
> > to the health of the project.  Amazon's biggest reviewer is widely
> > regarded as untrustworthy by people who know who she is, writing
> > reviews of books that she clearly hasn't read (those who don't
> > recognize her of course don't know this, and Amazon doesn't expose
> > enough information for casual users to reach that conclusion on their
> > own).
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > - John
> >
> > On Sep 5, 2011, at 6:02 PM, Anya Kamenetz wrote:
> >
> >> Really interesting stuff, John! Definitely agree with you on the
> >> "necessary but not sufficient" formulation.
> >>
> >>>> But the issue we’d like to discuss with the list is what a
> >>>> system with the same goals--ongoing, deep evaluation of complex
> >>>> learning--would look like if it were designed to work on the
> >>>> same scale as, say, the Khan Academy.  Is peer feedback
> >>>> sufficient to meet those goals?  If so, quality would somehow
> >>>> need to be controlled so that it doesn’t turn into a stream of
> >>>> YouTube comments, and if not some other method would have to be
> >>>> used to deal with large volumes of students.
> >>
> >> What strikes me is that there are different types of peers--some
> >> peers perhaps more equal than others. In a community of practice
> >> model there are fellow beginners, who have one type of feedback to
> >> offer, then there are people just ahead of you--like the sophomore,
> >> junior, senior to your freshman, who have a different type of
> >> feedback (less grounded in immediate understanding of what you're
> >> going through and more grounded in knowledge and experience), and
> >> then graduate student/TA/professor with a more sophisticated
> >> offering still.
> >>
> >> One can imagine a scalable system that incentivizes feedback
> >> according to the experience and sophistication of the person
> >> offering it, and thus its likely value to the user. Maybe it's a
> >> "freemium" model where learners give and receive feedback freely as
> >> a condition of participation up to a certain level of experience,
> >> and the most experienced participants receive other kinds of
> >> incentives (even money?) in exchange for offering the most
> >> detailed, sophisticated, time-consuming forms of feedback. I often
> >> think back to my summer studying capoeira where the most
> >> experienced students took on more and more responsibilities
> >> instructing the beginners, as an honor--but only the mestre gets
> >> paid.
> >>
> >> Of course there are other technological ways of encouraging quality
> >> control on a large system that depends for its value on freely
> >> offered feedback. These are all over the net. TripAdvisor, Amazon,
> >> eBay, Quora, Yelp are all good examples--Yelp in particular, again
> >> for the way it incentivizes its best providers of feedback, making
> >> them a recognized part of a community, allowing the raters to earn
> >> ratings. LinkedIn with its endorsement structure another one to
> >> look at. Maybe you need a system of badges, tags or profile
> >> keywords so you can ask a native Brazilian to read your Portuguese
> >> paper or a nationally ranked chess player to check out your game or
> >> someone with a stellar Github rating to look at your code. a
> >
> > _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list
> > of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> > (distributedcreativity.org) iDC at mailman.thing.net
> > https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >
> > List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> >
> > iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
> >
> > RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
> >
> > iDC Chat on Facebook:
> > http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
> >
> > Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (
> distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
>
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
>
> RSS feed:
> http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
>
> iDC Chat on Facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
>
> Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref
>

-- 
*New ebook!** *The Edupunks' Guide <http://edupunksguide.org/>*
Fast Company column* Life In Beta<http://www.fastcompany.com/user/anya-kamenetz>
*Tribune Media column* The Savings
Game<http://www.tmsfeatures.com/columns/business/personal-finance/savings-game/>
*Book* DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of  Higher
Education
<http://www.amazon.com/DIY-Edupunks-Edupreneurs-Transformation-Education/dp/1603582347>
*Blog* DIYUbook.com <http://diyubook.com/>
*Twitter *@Anya1anya <http://twitter.com/#%21/anya1anya>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20110907/f46d4817/attachment.htm 