[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

[John Bell]

Yes, I think the concepts are the same it's just the target metrics that are different.  Technorati specifically has good and bad points, but it's measuring broadcast impact really.  To be useful for education I suspect the metrics would have to be much more personal, more peer-based, and use data that isn't captured by existing signal monitors…those metrics may well feed into your second point on trust, though.

- John

On Sep 7, 2011, at 2:52 PM, John Sobol <soboltalk at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure if I am missing the point, but it seems to me that these tools
> exist and are very widely used already. In the business world sophisticated
> Social Media Monitoring tools are everywhere, measuring what was said by
> whom to whom and how that message made its way through the social
> media-sphere. Isn't this similar to what you are after? Tools to assess and
> quantify the usefulness of knowledge circulating in informal knowledge
> networks? That is the whole point of technorati, to identify the blogs that
> are 'most authoritative' based primarily but not exclusively on the number
> of inbound links. The idea being that if people are consistently returning
> somewhere for info about a subject then it is likely a high-quality source.
> 
> Also, I would argue that 'dialogues' are ends in and of themselves in
> digital - or what i call OS3 - culture. They don't need a reason to exist.
> They are existence itself. Just as they are in oral (OS1) culture. The
> subject of the conversation - useful or playful or solemn though it may be -
> is typically less transformative than the conversational dynamic itself,
> especially at the macro-social level. In other words, instead of seeking
> truthful answers digital culture is after trustworthy relationships. And yes
> this promises to change or at least challenge our definition of knowledge,
> but imo that is for the best.
> 
> John
> --
> www.youareyourmedia.com