[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

Wed Sep 7 19:23:38 UTC 2011

I don't have any such orthodoxy. I just have an opinion on your apparent 
naivete. The Internet is good for a lot of things, but as time goes by, 
more and more of them are corporate. To make it good for radical 
education is actually a project that interests me. However, the 
discussion in this thread just replicates the protocols of Web 2.0 
infotainment, a narcissistic hook and a very superficial format for 
learning. Let the maker and the user beware.

best, Brian

On 09/07/2011 01:56 PM, Anya Kamenetz wrote:
> Brian,
> doesn't your participation on this email list violate your orthodoxy of
> the skin-to-skin holy transmission of knowledge?
> a
>
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Brian Holmes
> <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com <mailto:bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     This is a timely subject just as public education is getting axed all
>     over the world. It will be the final victory of the bosses: without
>     books, without attention span, without ideas except those piped in by
>     the media and above all without others, control will be complete.
>
>     You'll get the source without the crowd, perfect sterility.
>
>     I submit that the chance to escape from total fear and submission
>     depends on having some contact to another speaking body in the room.
>
>     But probably the apolitical designer types can get two or three weeks
>     work making edu-sites for future capitalist game robots!
>
>     good luck, BH
>
>     On 09/06/2011 11:13 AM, John Bell wrote:
>      > Yes, I think identifying and distinguishing types of peers is an
>      > important aspect of the kind of system I'm talking about.  The part
>      > that's problematic is--without falling back on external validation
>      > like degrees and academic positions--figuring out which people are
>      > which type, and what the scope of the types are.  For example, I just
>      > did something similar for a proposal as part of the
>      > Mozilla+Journalism project where I was trying to identify commenters
>      > with expertise in different fields so they could add annotation to
>      > mass media articles.  In that system a commenter could claim a level
>      > of expertise when they made a comment and a trust metric would adjust
>      > their long-term credibility based on how other users rate that
>      > comment.  It's a refinement of the old Slashdot karma model, but one
>      > that seems useful in this situation.
>      >
>      >
>     (http://www.nmdjohn.com/2011/08/05/moznewslab-week-4-pitching-reposte/
>      > if anybody is curious.)
>      >
>      > But I think there are limits to how much participation can be
>      > incentivized without ending up back at cash, which I suspect
>      > introduces its own problems.  Look at the situation with Wikipedia
>      > where they rewarded participation by turning users into bureaucrats,
>      > creating a system that's often accused of being petty and detrimental
>      > to the health of the project.  Amazon's biggest reviewer is widely
>      > regarded as untrustworthy by people who know who she is, writing
>      > reviews of books that she clearly hasn't read (those who don't
>      > recognize her of course don't know this, and Amazon doesn't expose
>      > enough information for casual users to reach that conclusion on their
>      > own).
>      >
>      > So the question I'm left with is how to create incentives that go
>      > beyond status in the internal community.  Can external incentives be
>      > used without creating the equivalent of Warcraft gold farmers?  What
>      > would they be?
>      >
>      > - John
>      >
>      > On Sep 5, 2011, at 6:02 PM, Anya Kamenetz wrote:
>      >
>      >> Really interesting stuff, John! Definitely agree with you on the
>      >> "necessary but not sufficient" formulation.
>      >>
>      >>>> But the issue we’d like to discuss with the list is what a
>      >>>> system with the same goals--ongoing, deep evaluation of complex
>      >>>> learning--would look like if it were designed to work on the
>      >>>> same scale as, say, the Khan Academy.  Is peer feedback
>      >>>> sufficient to meet those goals?  If so, quality would somehow
>      >>>> need to be controlled so that it doesn’t turn into a stream of
>      >>>> YouTube comments, and if not some other method would have to be
>      >>>> used to deal with large volumes of students.
>      >>
>      >> What strikes me is that there are different types of peers--some
>      >> peers perhaps more equal than others. In a community of practice
>      >> model there are fellow beginners, who have one type of feedback to
>      >> offer, then there are people just ahead of you--like the sophomore,
>      >> junior, senior to your freshman, who have a different type of
>      >> feedback (less grounded in immediate understanding of what you're
>      >> going through and more grounded in knowledge and experience), and
>      >> then graduate student/TA/professor with a more sophisticated
>      >> offering still.
>      >>
>      >> One can imagine a scalable system that incentivizes feedback
>      >> according to the experience and sophistication of the person
>      >> offering it, and thus its likely value to the user. Maybe it's a
>      >> "freemium" model where learners give and receive feedback freely as
>      >> a condition of participation up to a certain level of experience,
>      >> and the most experienced participants receive other kinds of
>      >> incentives (even money?) in exchange for offering the most
>      >> detailed, sophisticated, time-consuming forms of feedback. I often
>      >> think back to my summer studying capoeira where the most
>      >> experienced students took on more and more responsibilities
>      >> instructing the beginners, as an honor--but only the mestre gets
>      >> paid.
>      >>
>      >> Of course there are other technological ways of encouraging quality
>      >> control on a large system that depends for its value on freely
>      >> offered feedback. These are all over the net. TripAdvisor, Amazon,
>      >> eBay, Quora, Yelp are all good examples--Yelp in particular, again
>      >> for the way it incentivizes its best providers of feedback, making
>      >> them a recognized part of a community, allowing the raters to earn
>      >> ratings. LinkedIn with its endorsement structure another one to
>      >> look at. Maybe you need a system of badges, tags or profile
>      >> keywords so you can ask a native Brazilian to read your Portuguese
>      >> paper or a nationally ranked chess player to check out your game or
>      >> someone with a stellar Github rating to look at your code. a
>      >
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