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It makes me wonder how we might take advantage of crowd sourcing here on campus? I worn if we could open videos to transcription by students or other fiends of the university.

There may be a magic formula involving a distributed community of hobbyists here. There's a lot of interest in the Civil War. The article mentions going to historical societies for help with the transcription. Oddly enough, this is a perfect example of "Cognitive Surplus" in action.

One big message here was pretty clear: Expertise still matters, and crowdsourcing doesn't change that (despite a stunningly silly argument I saw recently online that crowdsourcing laypeople is better than a doctor at diagnosing an illness. I mean, c'mon, let's not be ridiculous.). However, there are a few things going on here - building a community of people creating something based on a shared interest, which has manifold benefits. Cole, your example of transcribing videos....working with say the National Association of the Deaf to gather volunteers would make for a fantastic project. Also, there is a lot of learning potential in something like this. If something is done wrong by the crowd, then that's a teachable moment as to why it's wrong. Then you get a better crowd.

This reminded me of Cole Camplese's comments on the instant crowdsourcing of video recording the sessions at the 2011 TLT Symposium, Clay Shirky's example of that socially-written mathematics (?) paper, and a bit of Chris Long's posts on using digital tools in research.

The socially-written paper was about "P vs NP", which is a computer science/mathematics problem. A fairly simple explanation is here: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/ But yeah - crowdsourcing stuff like this is great when you have a community of people who really care about it. It's like having an army of amateur archeologists.