[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?
Ed Keller
kellere at newschool.edu
Wed Sep 7 20:01:31 UTC 2011
Greetings all,
I thought this might be an interesting moment to dive into the discussion, given
Brian and Anya's exchange about the relative [debatable] values of F2F
learning. I'd like to add another angle to the discussion.
As a provocation: the cover of a Babson/Sloan report, titled 'Learning on Demand,
Online Education in the United States, 2009', is instructive. In case the jpg attached does
not arrive with this email, I'll describe it. Across a neutral blue color field, a grid background
indexes three changing arrows of progress from left to right. The top arrow is 'Online Education',
going up. The second arrow is 'H1N1 Flu'... going up. The bottom arrow is 'Economy'... Going down.
I realize this is not the only comparison one might make, but given its overtones of global
network, global risk, I thought it could set another set of discussions in motion. In the report
the specter of a global pandemic is raised in relation to online education. I quote:
"WHAT CONTINGENCY PLANS DO INSTITUTIONS HAVE FOR H1N1?
Background: A series of questions about the effect of the H1N1 on institutions and the extent and
type of contingency plan were asked of chief academic officers. Of particular interest is the use of
online as part of the contingency plan.
The evidence: Proponents of online learning have long posited that moving face-to-face classes
online could become an important component of academic continuity planning. A potential H1N1
pandemic is such an event that might trigger such planning.
• Over two-thirds of institutions report that they have a formal contingency plan in place to deal
with a possible disruption from the H1N1 flu.
• Substituting online for face-to-face classes is a component of 67 percent of H1N1 contingency
plans.
• Twenty percent of institutions with no current online offerings include introducing online classes
as part of their contingency plans."
* * *
I'd say this is one way to slice the question open. We might ask, thinking across a 25-75 year timeframe,
what techniques of information distribution will make us most likely to learn rapidly enough to offset the
massive disruptions and catastrophic risks that climate change alone may create.
Another would be to conduct a analysis according to principles of 'general economy', asking a simple
question: how much does it COST energetically to move information from one mind to another, and
how efficient is F2F versus hybrid versus purely online?
Of course I'm aware that developing the criteria for this cost benefit will be awfully challenging, but-
especially in combination with planetary risk factors such as H1N1, the online edu question becomes
resonant in a different manner.
Cheers,
Ed Keller
________________________________________
Edward Keller
___Parsons the New School for Design
associate dean of distributed learning and technology
associate professor, School of Design Strategies
http://designexrisk.wordpress.com/
http://www.vimeo.com/groups/designexrisk
___AUM Studio : principal designer / co-founder
architecture, design technology & media
On Sep 7, 2011, at 3:26 PM, idc-request at mailman.thing.net wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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> 1. Re: Can DIY education be crowdsourced? (Anya Kamenetz)
> 2. Re: Can DIY education be crowdsourced? (Brian Holmes)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 14:56:44 -0400
> From: Anya Kamenetz <anyaanya at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?
> To: bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com
> Cc: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Message-ID:
> <CAPGT6mseqk1W3WdcQkA_hQMo1=ZwEqdUKTUMiCkMeUi3wMx6sg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> 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
>>>
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>
>
>
> --
> *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>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:23:38 -0500
> From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?
> Cc: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Message-ID: <4E67C4BA.4020803 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list
>>> of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
>>> (distributedcreativity.org <http://distributedcreativity.org>)
>> iDC at mailman.thing.net <mailto:iDC at mailman.thing.net>
>>> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
>>>
>>> List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
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>>> 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 <http://Del.icio.us> by adding
>> the tag iDCref
>>>
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
>> (distributedcreativity.org <http://distributedcreativity.org>)
>> iDC at mailman.thing.net <mailto: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 <http://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>
>>
>
>
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> End of iDC Digest, Vol 79, Issue 16
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