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Crowdsourcing Authority in the Classroom
“A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Ms. Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations.”
That is an example of some of the negative comments I received when I wrote a blog on grading in my “Cat in the Stack” column on a website for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory( HASTAC). I titled the post How To Crowdsource Grading and its premise grew out of a course I taught last year at Duke called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet"… more
Classroom Authority and Twitter
An interesting aspect of Twitter's recent surge in popularity has been how educators have embraced the technology, not just for networking and personal communication, but also in the classroom. Many teachers have found Twitter to be a helpful tool for accessing the backchannel—the discussion students are having about what is going on in the classroom—in real time. In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, Jeffrey R. Young interviewed two teachers who use Twitter in large lecture courses, projecting students' Twitter posts in the classroom live. Experiments like these frighten many instructors.… more
In Praise of Mo' Better Grading
Meanwhile, back at the pedagogical ranch...You may remember that back in November I reported on my experiment in grading, combining the long tradition of contract grading with what I call “crowdsourced grading.” Since I was already constructing “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” (ISIS 120) as a peer-taught course, I decided that the students responsible for team-leading each class would also be responsible for determining if that week’s required blogs on their reading assignments measured up to the contract standard. It didn’t seem like such a radical idea. This is a course on cognition and collaboration in the digital age and responsible evaluation, feedback, and participation are part of that equation. I thought of this as simply “practicing what I was preaching,” an object lesson to the students in how to be responsible public citizens of the Internet. Well, some people thought of it differently. They acted as if “Prof Davidson” was destroying civilization as we knew it.… more
Crowdsourcing Scholarship
A few weeks ago, just before the 2010 THATCAMP, a well-known technology and humanities “unconference,” got underway at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the center’s director, Dan Cohen, and his colleague and co-director, Tom Scheinfeldt, made a radical proposal. In a blog posting called “One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy," Cohen proposed that conference participants and others following the discussion on Twitter and in the academic blogosphere should assemble a book about digital media and higher education. The mandate was to do the project quickly – in only one week by “crowd sourcing” content – and to create a publishable work that could be mass produced by an established academic publisher while also remaining on the Web in open access form.… more