Group items tagged

Per our discussion in class about crowdsourcing, here is an article about the work of MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito using crowdsourcing to create maps of radiation after the disaster in Fukushima in Japan

Interesting examples of how some games are used for more than just entertainment including crowdsourcing for scientific progress, helping support research, and bridging the language gap.

Hi Adrian, thanks for sharing this. I think that the crowdsourcing potential for online games is great for solving real-life problems. Maybe educators could actually use such a platform for engaging students in school too, like crowdsourcing to solve problems in school.

A fascinating description about how corporate pressures can undermine the "crowdsourcing" model

Article written for mashable by our own classmate Dave Chen. Good work!

Speaking of crowdsourcing - how about outsourcing grading to the students themselves?  

HuffPo is now doing automated A/B testing for its headlines. How does that apply to ed? Online learners all have that liminal moment where they choose to click through or not click through. Proper A/B testing uncovers the motivation of why (or at least the effectiveness) of why some marketing copy and headlines work, and others dont. The best cloud-based ed. tech in the world means nothing if the click-through rate of a passive user is not substantial.

Articles on media literacy -  an excerpt from their newsletter:  Here's how George Mason history professor Mills Kelly teaches media literacy. "'We will work together as a group to create an online historical hoax that we will then turn loose on the internet to see if we can actually fool anyone.'" His students have created stories that have fooled Wikipedia (but not Reddit) and provoked the ire of Jimmy Wales himself. We're delightedly amused at this intriguing piece from Brendan Fitzgerald, which examines the tradition of published hoaxes within the larger discussion over media transparency and credibility. While we agree that planting deliberate lies makes our job a little tougher, there's definitely value in its effort to challenge the largely assumed reliability of Wikipedia and other crowdsourcing efforts. It begs the question: are today's kids digital natives or "digital naives?"

Last year, Iceland began updating the national constitution. Rather than start writing the document immediately, they solicited comments and text from citizens via Facebook and Twitter. They received over 3500 comments - from a country of 230,000 voters. Yesterday, a national referendum approved the final draft, which now goes to Parliament for final approval. Now THAT'S affecting change with social media.

Teachers rate educational apps. I'm interested in the intersection of crowdsourcing and teacher professional development.

That would be interesting to see what teachers develop....this brings me to the thought that was brought up by that guy (don't recall his name) at the i-lab about having teachers develop apps but having them be able to make money off of it....

Kaggle is a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the public. In exchange for a prize, winning competitors provide the algorithms that beat all other methods of solving a data crunching problem. Kaggle is in Class is a statistical & data mining learning tool for students.

I can see where several of his arguments are coming from, but I don't necessarily agree with completely banning Wikipedia from schools.