Crowdsourcing is the buzzword these days. It piqued my interest this morning because of the cool art projects that are springing up that might interest our teachers and students.
As I did a little research about the word, I discovered that crowdsourcing is something colleges and universities are beginning to take seriously. [Crowdsourcing, the Future of College Education]
YouTube got involved in crowdsourcing in May when it asked for Crowdsourcing suggestions for use with Google moderator, a lesser known Google product for "helping the world find the best input from an audience of any size."
According to Macmillan Dictionary, crowdsourcing is "trying to find a way of completing a task, a solution to a problem, etc. by asking a wide range of people or organisations if they can help, typically by using the Internet".
Journalist Jeff Howe identified the phenomenon and coined the term in his Wired article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", in June 2006.
Here's a video about the term:
(Side note: I found it interesting that Wikipedia is mentioned as a
What started me on this research path? Mashable's article about crowdsourcing ART projects:
My favorites of the projects mentioned?
- SwarmSketch "Collective sketching of the collective consciousness"
- Million Masterpiece "the world's largest collaborative arts project and online drawing community" and
- The Sheep Market "10,000 sheep created by online workers"
AND, we could do a crowdsourcing project (either art or any other discipline) using Google Moderator at our school.
Now that would be the coolest.
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