Skip to main content

Home/ CrowdsourcingGroupThink/ The Future of E-Learning is Crowd Sourcing
Smadar Goldstein

The Future of E-Learning is Crowd Sourcing - 5 views

started by Smadar Goldstein on 01 Apr 12
  • Smadar Goldstein
     
    So, right off the bat, I need to correct a common misrepresentation that I repeated in my first paragraph. Crowdsourcing is not intended to be "random people from around the Web," but, rather to serve as a tool for bringing together qualified, though distributed individuals. However, while Howe's model may be great for digital photography, can it really work for something as intellectually nuanced as instructional design?
  • Smadar Goldstein
     
    I posted the quote above from Justin Marquis, Ph.D, from his article, The Future of E-Learning is Crowd Sourcing, posted by Cary Harrod. I posted this quote, because I, too, shared his skepticism, in that how can we gain intelligent, useful information from 'random people from around the Web?' I am gaining insight that it is not meant to be random, brainless people, but people who have passion, shared interest and knowledge about specific subject.

    My personal skeptical thoughts that remain are: what if some skeptic, un-passionate web surfers post unintelligent comments and stain an otherwise intelligent and gainful crowdsourced conversation?

    How do you know where to begin?

    Are there specific questions or topics that are most appropriate for crowd sourcing and how does one know what they are?

    I certainly am more convinced of the appeal of crowdsourcing, especially after having viewed Jeff Howe's video http://youtu.be/F0-UtNg3ots. It's a wonderful method of gathering opinions, perspectives, and insights to other people's experiences.
  • Carol Arco
     
    Crowdsourcing, like the Internet doesn't guarantee the "credibility" of the content. So you don't know if information provided by the person contributing is brainless or qualified. For years we were told that the content on Wikipedia wasn't reliable because it was open for anyone to edit it and there was no way to know if it was true. But it was great because it was up to date information and it seemed true, based on our learned knowledge. We weren't allowed to cite it, but we could use it wisely. Jeff Howe says, "I believe that many jobs, maybe even a majority of jobs, will be performed online as we move towards a crowdsourced world. We will work with a distributed network of people, who we may never meet, to create things for other people who we may never meet."

    How do we qualify that the network of people are people you want on your team, there should be some way to check their qualifications and credentials. He also said, "Seems a little sad,..." What do you think he means by that? Its sad that we'll never meet the people who make up our network, or the people who are at the other end of our network?

To Top

Start a New Topic » « Back to the CrowdsourcingGroupThink group