[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?
Brian Holmes
bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com
Wed Sep 7 19:23:38 UTC 2011
I don't have any such orthodoxy. I just have an opinion on your apparent
naivete. The Internet is good for a lot of things, but as time goes by,
more and more of them are corporate. To make it good for radical
education is actually a project that interests me. However, the
discussion in this thread just replicates the protocols of Web 2.0
infotainment, a narcissistic hook and a very superficial format for
learning. Let the maker and the user beware.
best, Brian
On 09/07/2011 01:56 PM, Anya Kamenetz wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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
> >
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