Your last assignments for your individual weblog (not the group weblog) are as follows:
Next week we will have daily presentations on the group weblog projects done by class participants. On each day of presentations (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) your assignment is to write a brief entry (one or two paragraphs) commenting substantively on one (or both) of the projects presented in class that day.
“Commenting substantively” means write a bit more than, “Great site, guys!” If you think the site is great, say why. If you have a question or comment, share it. Be sure to make a link from your entry to one of the entries at the group site(s) you are discussing (so it creates a “ping” at that site).
At the end of next week, each person in class should have three new, brief entries reacting to other classmates’ group sites/presentations.
As always, be sure to check both your group and individual blogs, using the links provided on our links page, to be sure they look the way you intend.
Categories: Assignments · Individual Weblog
There has increasing discussion in recent years, in academia, in business, and in popular discourse, about the importance of social and technological networks for producing, evaluating, and disseminating information. Crowdsourcing is one example of a term that draws on network theory to describe (and also to advocate) new ways of producing information using socio-technical networks.
At the Crowdsourcing weblog, Jeff Howe defines the term as follows:
“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”
The term draws on the idea of outsourcing: an organization turning to sources outside the organization in order to carry out essential organizational tasks. For example, a car manufacturer might outsource some (or all) of the production tasks involved in constructing a particular car to factories owned by someone else, often located in a foreign country where production costs are lower.
Crowdsourcing is closely connected to the ideas of open source and collaborative production. It also relies on research into social networks (recently given the popular term The Wisdom of Crowds) that suggests that the collective judgment of diverse groups of people acting independently often produces better decisions than any single individuals in the group, including experts.
New information technologies are not required for taking advantage of “the wisdom of crowds” or for engaging in crowdsourcing, but the design of many NITs can help promote the independent collaboration these ideas rely on.
Today in class we will discuss the idea of crowdsourcing and look at a few examples of crowdsourcing in action:
Categories: Concepts and Terms
