Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Crowdsourcing - An Educational Experiment in L.A.

This is a response to

Save Our Summer Project Coming July 6

a project by group of students at USC. The objective as described at on the site is to provide free, online learning solution to the cancellation of K-8 summer school in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Proposal:

* Crowdsource the tagging of resources
* Host on Free online aggregation site
* Offer some tools for dialogue.

To play:

  • Find a resource and tag it: sosclassroom
  • send the resource to sosclassroom[at]gmail.com
  • tweet us @sosclassroom or #sosclassroom
Crowdsourcing NOW on my summer reading list. I tend to do this all the time as I go on to twitter and find resources for my own learning. But crowdsourcing in the business model refers to replacing a function that is usually paid for by tapping into collective knowledge. Now this IS something I can dig into. Looking specifically at our situation in L.A. it's interesting to find a tech solution to our budget woes.

This is my response to this novel experiment:

Hey congrats on "crowdsourcing"! Now that you have the crowds attention (me) let's see if we can get some work done. Let's start by defining who "we" are. "Our class at USC" what class? and are you speaking for the class or is it YOU and a few interested folk? I DO see how the your site works and it's a great concept. How do we bridge the concept to making it a practice? If the intended audience is LAUSD teachers to gather resources and LAUSD families in comsuming these resources then what is the plan? I'm comitted to a sustained effort and partnership between classroom teacher, the families we service, and interested community like yourself. I invite you to continue the conversation.

1 comment:

Mark C. Marino said...

Jose,


Thank you for your post and your encouragement!


Let's start by defining who "we" are. "Our class at USC" what class? and are you speaking for the class or is it YOU and a few interested folk?


The class is a summer Writing 340 class in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at USC. There are roughly 15 students from a variety of disciplines and their instructor. The students are sophomores, juniors, and seniors. However, that course wraps up in early August, so another group of students in the fall will have to take up the project.

The other part of "we" are the advisory board.

Still another part of "we" are the kind folks like yourself who have helped us spread the word and identify resources.


How do we bridge the concept to making it a practice?


At the heart of this project is tagging (social bookmarking). If we could just generalize the activity of having people tag free (and effective) online educational resources using a shared set of tags (gradesk12, langarts, math, etc.), then anyone could find and explore these resources. The sosclassroom tag helps us to filter out the sites directly sent to us. But anyone can use that material. It's just a matter of shared tagging practice.

The plan right now is to get the word out to as many places as possible. We've hit the Internet but now need to hit the streets with fliers and word of mouth. We'll work to get word to LAUSD teachers once school comes back in session.

It sounds like we share many of the same priorities. Let's continue the conversation!!