Brian,<br>doesn't your participation on this email list violate your orthodoxy of the skin-to-skin holy transmission of knowledge? <br>a<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Brian Holmes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com">bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">This is a timely subject just as public education is getting axed all<br>
over the world. It will be the final victory of the bosses: without<br>
books, without attention span, without ideas except those piped in by<br>
the media and above all without others, control will be complete.<br>
<br>
You'll get the source without the crowd, perfect sterility.<br>
<br>
I submit that the chance to escape from total fear and submission<br>
depends on having some contact to another speaking body in the room.<br>
<br>
But probably the apolitical designer types can get two or three weeks<br>
work making edu-sites for future capitalist game robots!<br>
<br>
good luck, BH<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
On 09/06/2011 11:13 AM, John Bell wrote:<br>
> Yes, I think identifying and distinguishing types of peers is an<br>
> important aspect of the kind of system I'm talking about. The part<br>
> that's problematic is--without falling back on external validation<br>
> like degrees and academic positions--figuring out which people are<br>
> which type, and what the scope of the types are. For example, I just<br>
> did something similar for a proposal as part of the<br>
> Mozilla+Journalism project where I was trying to identify commenters<br>
> with expertise in different fields so they could add annotation to<br>
> mass media articles. In that system a commenter could claim a level<br>
> of expertise when they made a comment and a trust metric would adjust<br>
> their long-term credibility based on how other users rate that<br>
> comment. It's a refinement of the old Slashdot karma model, but one<br>
> that seems useful in this situation.<br>
><br>
> (<a href="http://www.nmdjohn.com/2011/08/05/moznewslab-week-4-pitching-reposte/" target="_blank">http://www.nmdjohn.com/2011/08/05/moznewslab-week-4-pitching-reposte/</a><br>
> if anybody is curious.)<br>
><br>
> But I think there are limits to how much participation can be<br>
> incentivized without ending up back at cash, which I suspect<br>
> introduces its own problems. Look at the situation with Wikipedia<br>
> where they rewarded participation by turning users into bureaucrats,<br>
> creating a system that's often accused of being petty and detrimental<br>
> to the health of the project. Amazon's biggest reviewer is widely<br>
> regarded as untrustworthy by people who know who she is, writing<br>
> reviews of books that she clearly hasn't read (those who don't<br>
> recognize her of course don't know this, and Amazon doesn't expose<br>
> enough information for casual users to reach that conclusion on their<br>
> own).<br>
><br>
> So the question I'm left with is how to create incentives that go<br>
> beyond status in the internal community. Can external incentives be<br>
> used without creating the equivalent of Warcraft gold farmers? What<br>
> would they be?<br>
><br>
> - John<br>
><br>
> On Sep 5, 2011, at 6:02 PM, Anya Kamenetz wrote:<br>
><br>
>> Really interesting stuff, John! Definitely agree with you on the<br>
>> "necessary but not sufficient" formulation.<br>
>><br>
>>>> But the issue we’d like to discuss with the list is what a<br>
>>>> system with the same goals--ongoing, deep evaluation of complex<br>
>>>> learning--would look like if it were designed to work on the<br>
>>>> same scale as, say, the Khan Academy. Is peer feedback<br>
>>>> sufficient to meet those goals? If so, quality would somehow<br>
>>>> need to be controlled so that it doesn’t turn into a stream of<br>
>>>> YouTube comments, and if not some other method would have to be<br>
>>>> used to deal with large volumes of students.<br>
>><br>
>> What strikes me is that there are different types of peers--some<br>
>> peers perhaps more equal than others. In a community of practice<br>
>> model there are fellow beginners, who have one type of feedback to<br>
>> offer, then there are people just ahead of you--like the sophomore,<br>
>> junior, senior to your freshman, who have a different type of<br>
>> feedback (less grounded in immediate understanding of what you're<br>
>> going through and more grounded in knowledge and experience), and<br>
>> then graduate student/TA/professor with a more sophisticated<br>
>> offering still.<br>
>><br>
>> One can imagine a scalable system that incentivizes feedback<br>
>> according to the experience and sophistication of the person<br>
>> offering it, and thus its likely value to the user. Maybe it's a<br>
>> "freemium" model where learners give and receive feedback freely as<br>
>> a condition of participation up to a certain level of experience,<br>
>> and the most experienced participants receive other kinds of<br>
>> incentives (even money?) in exchange for offering the most<br>
>> detailed, sophisticated, time-consuming forms of feedback. I often<br>
>> think back to my summer studying capoeira where the most<br>
>> experienced students took on more and more responsibilities<br>
>> instructing the beginners, as an honor--but only the mestre gets<br>
>> paid.<br>
>><br>
>> Of course there are other technological ways of encouraging quality<br>
>> control on a large system that depends for its value on freely<br>
>> offered feedback. These are all over the net. TripAdvisor, Amazon,<br>
>> eBay, Quora, Yelp are all good examples--Yelp in particular, again<br>
>> for the way it incentivizes its best providers of feedback, making<br>
>> them a recognized part of a community, allowing the raters to earn<br>
>> ratings. LinkedIn with its endorsement structure another one to<br>
>> look at. Maybe you need a system of badges, tags or profile<br>
>> keywords so you can ask a native Brazilian to read your Portuguese<br>
>> paper or a nationally ranked chess player to check out your game or<br>
>> someone with a stellar Github rating to look at your code. a<br>
><br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><b><span style="color:rgb(51, 204, 255)">New ebook!</span></b><b> </b><a href="http://edupunksguide.org/" target="_blank">The Edupunks' Guide</a><b><br>Fast Company column</b> <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/user/anya-kamenetz" target="_blank">Life In Beta</a><br>
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