Week 1: What is Crowdsourcing?

Let’s start the summer off right by “cutting the cords” to the computer and heading to the beach with a great book! Last year, I suggested Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind in order to help us redesign our classrooms to encourage creativity skills necessary for our students to succeed and compete in their future jobs. This year I’m suggesting the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. This is a great read that will introduce you to the concept of crowdsourcing
and “Prosumers.”

In short, it examines how the role of the traditional consumer has evolved to become that of a “prosumer” — consumers who now want to help produce or shape the product. “Smart” companies are embracing this change, allowing for crowdsourcing to include the end users in the process of the creation of the product, or even opening up proprietary resources in order to welcome collaboration. The outcome has benefited businesses in many ways, from reduced costs, to better products, to solutions to difficult problems. This “democratization of the media” is a huge societal shift from “business as usual.” Companies that resist the change run the risk of being abandoned by the prosumers who desire a collaborative role or the ability to “hack” or “mashup” the product for their own ends.

It is becoming clear that many of our students’ future jobs will involve some level of crowdsourcing or collaboration. At the very least, because of the Internet, these elements will profoundly transform culture and business in the twenty-first century. I hope after your read of Wikinomics that you’ll consider the conclusion that I have come to: that many of the directions that businesses are taking can be applied to the classroom as well and, in fact, should be employed in order to help prepare our students for their futures. As teachers, we must keep learning relevant and engaging for our students. I believe our classrooms must resemble a student’s larger reality, rather than be artificial and stagnant environments, disconnected from the rest of the world. To that aim, I believe that just as businesses are democratizing their media to include their customers’ changing attitudes, needs and desires, the classroom should also democratize learning to accommodate for 21st Century prosumers.

Tapscott and Williams suggest different areas for businesses to transform in order to remain relevant to the new prosumers. Here’s a brief description of each of them and my “translation” of how they could be applied to a classroom in order to democratize the learning experience.

1. Facilitate customer hacking/remixing of the product.

Translation for Classrooms:
Differentiate instruction and allow for collaboration with students by making lessons reconfigurable/editable in order to follow the direction and needs of the students.

2. Lose Control: understand that customers will treat your product as a platform for their own inventions.
Stay current with your customers’ plans/desires or they will “invent around you.” In short, allow for customers’ input and collaboration, or they will go elsewhere.

Translation for Classrooms:
Rather than dominating the direction of learning by dictating, “You will learn this in the way that I decide,” teachers need to instead ask, “How do you want to learn this?” Just like businesses, schools will increasingly face competition from alternative learning environments (such as online/virtual schools) and “clients” will go elsewhere unless traditional schools evolve to allow for a more democratized environment.

3. Become a Peer.
Realize that your business is really “not about creating finished products but creating innovation ecosystems.”

Translation for Classrooms:
Allow students to do the creating of authentic work that has purpose. Tasks need to have relevance to student lives rather than just to produce a grade or checklist of skills.

4. Share the Fruits.
Allow customers/clients to own part of the rights to the product.

Translation for Classrooms:
Whose work is it? Students should not only own it but also be allowed to “take it with them.” In other words, assessments and products should not be conducted in isolation but should have real use and be able to be connected to future work (in the next grade, for instance). Assessments and artifacts should be preserved (i.e., digital portfolio) to allow for future reflection.

Finish up your week by slowly getting back on the computer by reading Andy Carvin’s post on crowdsourcing at his PBS blog, learning.now.

Week 2: Get to Know Your Prosumers

As we open up our classrooms to the Internet, bring in Web 2.0 tools, and seek to flatten our classrooms, it’s good to take periodic pause and examine the “state of union.” It is essential — just as it is for any other business — to research and understand our customers (students) in order to successfully serve them. This can be difficult in a world where stories in the media focus more on the hazards than the successes of student Internet experience. We must dig past the sensationalism and seek out clear and balanced reports in order to understand our students’ experiences. For instance, what are their motivations for being active participants in the “digital revolution”? What drives them to create “mashups”? What compels them to candidly post their private lives online?

One of the best resources that I’ve found to get to know what our young digital citizens are doing online is Frontline’s “Growing Up Online”, which you can watch online for free. The episode examines many aspects and issues regarding the “first generation coming of age in the Internet era” in a balanced and non-alarmist way. After viewing the episode, you can continue the conversation with other educators at the “Discussion” section on the site.

A great book to follow this film up with is Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online by Anastasia Goodstein. Again, it presents the information we need in a balanced and informative way.

Next, make sure you subscribe to the blog Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten in order to gain a “secret view into the world of the net-generation.” Here’s a great interview with Van Petten on “Teaching for the Future Podcast.”

Week 3: Start Crowdsourcing
Before we ask our students to do anything, I believe we must first do it ourselves. As an example, it is pointless to demand that our students publish to blogs if we aren’t publishing to our own blogs. We show that we believe an approach is valid and worthy by implementing it in our own lives, in and out of the classroom. For instance, I don’t know a reading teacher who isn’t also an avid reader.

In order to fully understand how crowdsourcing and collaboration are transforming the world our students live in, and how they might play out in their futures, we must also engage in activities that include these skills and attributes.
There are many ways to do this, but here are some suggestions to consider:

• Tagging
  You’re probably already doing this with your blogs, but tagging is crowdsourcing in one of its simplest and most common forms. Last year, I blogged about the site del.icio.us and how it can save you hours of search time if you use the tags that are assigned to sites by other people. Make sure you’re adding to the wealth by keeping all your bookmarks online with a tool like del.icio.us. In doing so, you’re not only making your bookmarks easily accessible from any computer connected to the Internet, but you’re also helping to build a common resource that benefits many.
• Wikipedia
  You’ve read it, now write it. Wikipedia is perhaps the most famous example of crowdsourcing. Go find your favorite subject, hobby, book, or passion and add to the writing of one passage. Your students will be very impressed when you show it to them in the fall!
• Digg
  Don’t just consume the news; decide the news. Digg is a crowdsourcing platform where people “push” the popularity of news stories and content by “voting” on them. Rather than media conglomerates deciding which stories are important, through your participation, you can help define what “makes it to the top.”
• reCaptcha
  I’m sure you know about those annoying programs that insist you type in a term or letters when submitting a form on the Internet in order to prove that you’re a human and not a “bot.” You probably have one installed on your own blog for people submitting comments. Instead, install reCaptcha to make all that work count. reCaptcha uses words from actual books that have been scanned (rather than meaningless strings of letters) and haven’t yet been successfully identified by OCR software because of its limitations. In installing reCaptcha on your site, you are assisting millions of other users in properly identifying the words that still need recognizing.
• Gwap
  From the same folks who brought us reCaptcha, Gwap is a site where you can play games with another user in order to help tag and identify photos or other media in order to “help computers get smarter.” Wired Science recently did a piece on the creator of reCaptcha and Gwap that’s worth checking out.
• SecondLife
  SecondLife is an entire virtual world that has been built through crowdsourcing — every object has been created by the users. Virtual worlds take some getting used to and need more of an introduction than the scope of this article could provide. However, at least go visit their website as well as the Second Life Education Wiki in order to see the possible benefits of such a collaborative space and its potential for education.

These are just a handful of sites where you can experience crowdsourcing first-hand. Here’s a resource that lists many other examples. Also, go see a great visual representation of what crowdsourcing is at the Ten Thousand Cents project.

Week 4: Prepare a Democratized Classroom

Finish your regimen by reading the excellent paper, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” by Henry Jenkins, et al. in order to further understand the skills necessary for the new collaborative culture. According to the paper, “Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call the new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.”

Using this “call to action,” begin developing next year’s curriculum with these skills integrated. Be on the lookout for crowdsourcing opportunities that you can involve your class in, in order to not only help strengthen the skills necessary for their futures, but to engage them in learning by providing a democratized classroom where they can co-create their learning environment.

How are you or others you know of adapting the concept of crowdsourcing to the classroom? I hope you’ll share your ideas, experiences and questions throughout the month.