Crowdsourcing has become a popular mechanism to generate innovations and harness the contributions of mass volunteers for a specific purpose. Crowdsourcing often takes the form of a company or agency placing an open call for help to solve a problem. Individuals respond with potential solutions and in some cases receive cash rewards if their solution is selected. The concept is that the company placing the call receives a greater variety of solutions at a lower cost than would have been possible by retaining dedicated problem-solving specialists on staff.

Innovation Exchange is just one of many Web sites that have sprung up to facilitate crowdsourcing of business solutions.

MIT’s homepage design refreshes everyday, thanks to crowdsourcing.

But there is another type of crowdsourcing—one that seeks public participation not so much because of the distributed expertise but because of the sheer power of the masses.

The Galaxy Zoo project, for example, crowdsources volunteers to help classify galaxies according to their shapes. Over 200,000 people have contributed to date.

The recent tweet, blog, photo, and video feeds from Iran’s disputed presidential election could be considered a perfect storm of crowdsourcing, citizen participation feeding into the traditional news outlets.

The application of crowdsourcing to education has been discussed before—for example, by Rob Jacobs on the Education Innovation blog. Jacobs makes the case for teachers to leverage, through crowdsourcing, professional learning communities in what he calls the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative approach.

Tony Karrer’s eLearning Technology blog has also discussed crowdsourcing and e-learning technology. Exemplifying the very concept of crowdsourcing, Karrer initiated brainstorming on a new term to replace “crowdsourcing;” suggestions included “peersourcing” and “experttapping.” The type of collective input Karrer refers to appears to be focused on getting help from peers or others who have expertise in a certain area.

Another type of crowdsourcing that could also be leveraged in instructional media development is the wisdom of the masses, the potential learners who may not have any expertise in instructional design or educational curriculum development. For it is only the learners who possess the secret to how they learn.

The key to crowdsourcing is matching the need (what you are seeking) with those who can address the need (provide solutions). That is, seeking help from appropriate sources. In publishing, for example, content experts are appropriate sources of accuracy review and end-user representatives are appropriate sources of usability review.

While there may be value in an educator seeking help from other educators and professionals, as Jacob’s model suggests, there may be equal or greater value in seeking input from the learner him or herself—for it is ultimately the learner whom educators are seeking to change (that is, we want the learner to learn).

Enter crowdsourcing.

Here is the idea: Basic educational materials (publications, podcasts, learning objects, etc.) are placed in an online environment. The public is invited to enter the environment and experience the existing educational materials. They are then challenged to create and post a summary of or response to what they just learned, using whatever medium they prefer. Some users might create a short video, some might choose to write, some might create a Pachyderm.

The learner-created media would supplement the teacher-generated materials, and could enhance other learners’ experiences through social learning.

Have you tried something like this? Would you be willing to?

Popularity: 37% [?]

When I was a kid, the whole world was one giant “Learn-O-Rama.” For the most part (outside of the standard classroom), I picked what interested me and learned my way through it. It was a nonlinear process, much like a bloodhound follows its nose to sniff out new information.

Nonlinear learning suggests that how we work our way through information can itself contain information, and frame our learning. “It’s the road not the destination,” said Jared Bendis, a multimedia developer who works and teaches in the area of nonlinear multimedia storytelling at Case Western. This may seem like a new concept to many: the idea that the learner chooses the sequence in which they learn new material.

But the idea on nonlinear learning isn’t new. It’s been discussed in the literature for some time. It’s only in the past few years that tools have emerged to take advantage of a nonlinear approach and put it within reach of educators, not just programmers (remember Macromedia Director and Toolbook? Yikes.) One tool we’ve discussed here before is Pachyderm, a multimedia web-based authoring program that creates highly interactive flash presentations without having to be an Adobe Flash programmer. (See Chris’s Pachyderm post.)

Most online learning remains linear with learner choices limited to “next-page-previous-page.” What nonlinear learning offers is a model based on self-organization of ideas by the learner where, as Eleanor Duckworth points out in The Having of Wonderful Ideas, “the individual has done the work of putting [ideas] together for himself or herself, and they give rise to new ways to put them together.”

“Learning often takes jumps throwing new light on and affecting much that has been learned before,” says Dr. Uri Merry of the Institute of Organizational Consultation. “In learning sometimes a small input can have enormous reverberations. We learn with disorderly jumps between whole and parts, parts and whole.” (Nonlinear learning LO14329.) When you combine this nonlinearity with the power of these disorderly jumps in learning, you arrive at a place of wonderful chaos. The kind of chaos that made learning so effective and compelling to us as kids.

A nonlinear approach is not for every learner; there is evidence that learning styles can predispose a learner toward or against it. And some material is intrinsically linear, as in step-by-step procedural knowledge. But the potential for a nonlinear approach to impact e-learning is too good to pass up as another tool to add to the mix. It all boils down to the potential for nonlinear multimedia storytelling. But that’s a story we’ll take up at another time.

Popularity: 46% [?]

I think it is safe to say that for most of us the personal computer is the first place we go when we are looking for web-based information; however, new web-ready mobile devices are emerging with increased speed and are blurring the line of what traditionally constitutes a viable endpoint for digital content. Have you seen the new Verizon netbook? Is it a laptop, a souped-up PDA? Neither, it’s a “netbook”—netbooks have been around for awhile now, but the fact that this one was selling for under $200 definitely caught my eye.

As the computing power of mobile devices improves and they become more affordable, the demand for content that works well on these platforms continues to grow.  Consequently, new possibilities for delivering E-learning content to mobile devices are redefining the E-learning industry in exciting ways.

While many user interface and usability people have given lukewarm reviews of the Kindle, the popularity of this E-book device has revealed what appears to be strong evidence of consumer demand for this type of technology. It’s hard to find fault with the practical benefits of having an ultra-lightweight E-book that holds up to 200 books, connects to the Internet wirelessly to download content and displays text in a relatively familiar format without the flicker of the CRT monitor. A sign of things to come? Many think so, like Steve Brotman in his Vcball blog.

How might a ubiquitous E-book like the Kindle and other new mobile web-ready devices reshape the world of instructional content? Smartphones like the iPhone and Palm Pre are quickly building a loyal following of application developers and end-users. The iPhone 3 will be released soon and Apple recently stated they have over 50 thousand applications for download in their App Store where over 1 billion applications have been downloaded by their 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch customers.  Until the Kindle can withstand the rigors of being tethered to a 3rd grader and Mom and Dad are willing to pay for little Johnny’s new iPhone, it’s hard to imagine these types of devices displacing the book on a large scale for the K-12 demographic (although there are numerous educational applications available for this group).  Nevertheless, let’s look at some examples of how mobile devices are already enabling new ways of delivering educational media.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

Through the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies, American taxpayers invest billions of dollars every year into research to improve health, safety, the environment, scientific understanding, etc.

The accountability of whether these investments have real impact for Americans is tied to the education and communication of research findings.

It is the education/communication set of activities that “maximizes the return on the research investment; it provides value to the research product, which is intrinsically worthless” (Charles Wallace in Transportation Research Circular 488).

Everett Rogers’s famous “diffusion of innovations” theory describes the process of new discoveries moving into practice through a sequence of adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Rogers emphasized the importance of communications in implementation.

Cuts to public education funding present a challenge to the ability to broadly communicate research discoveries. While increased tuition may be justified by the private benefits that result from a college diploma, will the benefits of publicly funded research be associated disproportionately with those who can afford higher education?

Or can we figure out a way to utilize technology to provide open access educational materials for the benefit of the population as a whole?

The cultural movement for open (free) educational resources continues to grow.

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Popularity: 93% [?]