I’ve become a minor celebrity since I advocated “crowdsourcing grading.” Not necessarily in a good way. I wrote a blog that has seen over 20,000 visitors on “How to Crowdsource Grading” and now I’m always asked, as if people know the answer, “Is it still working? Aren’t students getting away with murder?”
Well, no, in fact. It is still working. And they are still challenging one another and themselves with a depth and complexity that continues to blow me away. Would that our nation’s pundits were have as wise, careful, considered, and considerate in their judgments as these students!
This week, we have a visitor coming, Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Pomona College, an expert on new forms of reading, writing, and publishing on line. My students will introduce her at a public lecture and will interview her after. In preparation for her visit, two of them led us in a very provocative class conversation about the pros and cons of crowdsourced, collaborative authorship and they gave us a wonderful reading list. For those of you not fortunate enough to be in the class, I copy that below. In the meantime, the message for me still is: if students are challenged, if they know what their learning will make a difference in their lives, the sky is the limit. And that’s the limit we’re going for!
Here’s the reading/viewing assignment for the second unit in my class called “Twenty-First Century Literacies.” And the assignment the two peer-leaders have set for their classmates:
Literacies: Authorship, publishing, reading, writing
1. NYT: Summary of SQ experiment; crowdsourcing of PR of academic journals
NYTimes article on Peer Reviewing (good 1st read?):
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?_r=1
Media Commons:
**Shakespeare Quarterly Peer-Review:
http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2010/09/peer-review-20.html
Media Commons (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
The New Everyday: Academic journals via peer review crowdsourcing online
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/how-it-works
2. Crowdsourcing art
Crowd-sourcing art (LoC):
http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2009/06/lick-this-loc-flickr-and-limits-of.html
3. Crowdsourcing non-text (here: mathematical proof)
Blogs and Wikis used to evaluate a claimed proof in just a week:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/science/17proof.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=markoff%20theorists%20&st=cse
4. Legality: rights, authorship, copyright, etc.
Video Book (with video of radio talk):
http://aljean.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/contractual-mayhem-on-the-absurdities-of-moving-from-paper-to-digital-in-academic-publishing/
Details of contract for Video Book published by MIT:
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/me-n-mit-building-better-contracts-line-publishing
5. Digital transformation of the disciplines (instead of the disciplines using digital to further the old way of doing things).
Be Online or Be Irrelevant (by Dave):
http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2010/be-online-or-be-irrelevant/
Further Reading:
HOMEWORK:
Read the following blog post and then post a response to all that we have discussed today, or what you have read here or found on your own as relates to the topic.
Googling Peer Review (Mike):
How Google works: (optional supplement; link within article too)
http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html
(as a giant peer reviewer)
Also: Find out something about Kathleen Fitzgerald that you did not already know.
Also interesting:
UVA Director of Digital Research at UVA Library
Monopolies of Invention (speech by Bethanie Nowviskie at 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention):
http://nowviskie.org/2009/monopolies-of-invention/