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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.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

"Museum of the City of New York -- New York, NY HD 51480, Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open sourced Ontologies and Crowd sourced Workers Lacy Schutz, Project Director Outright: $50,000 To support: The development of methods and tools to facilitate the description of digitized primary sources by combining "crowdsourcing" tactics with linked open data and semantic Web technologies."

Interesting list of grant awards in the humanities. The quoted one above jumped out at me, but there are plenty of other good ideas in there. I'd be interested to see what others think.

One of my idols from my photography days, saw him speak once at Pitt. Still uses film. These two paragraphs were interesting: The only color picture in the New York exhibit was taken more recently, on Jan. 20, 2009, at one of the inaugural balls. Newly sworn-in President Obama and the first lady wave to the crowd from a brightly lit stage. All across the bottom half of the photo, the crowd waves back, with a sea of upraised illuminated smartphones. "It's an illustration about the use of cameras these days," Erwitt says. Inaugurals, graduations, birthday parties, backyard barbecues - everybody's taking pictures. Too many? "All you need is a pencil and a piece of paper to write a novel, don't you?" the Magnum photographer answers with a wry smile. But he points out that "not even with a very good pencil" will those novels necessarily become the next War and Peace. The same for photographs.

Good read on gaming and crowd sourcing to solve long-standing scientific problems.

anyone familiar with Learning Catalytics? sounds like it's invite-only, but might be worth a look.

an engagement initiative seems like a good idea. many of the approaches are implementations of active learning strategies, and I think having faculty from multiple disciplines exploring and sharing is a good way to test the effectiveness of various approaches. we just met with faculty from architectural engineering who've been flipping since 2008. one observation they made was that they flipped to allow student teams to work on group projects during class time. I had always thought that was a good idea for logistical purposes (especially in a team-heavy college like engineering), but they made a point I had not thought of: using classroom flip in that manner also allowed for the teams to have access to faculty advice and guidance while they were meeting to work on their projects. that seems like it may have huge benefits, especially at key points in a group assignment. all a long way of saying, there's much to learn. the blended learning initiative was essentially a 'classroom flip' approach as well, so some of the ways faculty adapted instruction for those courses might be relevant here too.

Angela: Let's talk about it. Gary: Tapping into first-hand experience would be great. I know a bit from the National Conference on Academic Transformation conference. The example that comes to mind is a flip where students learn about math through some short (5 minute) video tutorials and then attend "class" in a lab environment to work in teams and get access to the GA and faculty. It taps into a lot of the features of "student engagement" as measured by the National Survey on Student Engagement with factors such as increased student-student work, collaborative problem solving, immediate feedback, and increased student-faculty contact. Overall, an excellent design.

Example of online publishing as part of a grad program.