e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates

Update #5 - Crowdsourcing and Collective Intelligence

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND CROWDSOURCING

Crowdsourcing is gathering together people who randomly are interested in something and creating a solution. It can be an idea or a solution to a problem, or perhaps money (such as GoFundMe). Some have argued that crowdsourcing is really just outsourcing one’s work to the crowd.

"Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers." https://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html

Crowdsourcing is about turning social media into productivity and can change the way we work, hire, research, make and market. https://crowdsourcingweek.com/what-is-crowdsourcing/

Crowdsourcing outsources work to the crowd by breaking up a work project or problem into small discrete parts, each of which can be managed and innovated on by the crowd. https://blog.fieldagent.net/how-crowdsourcing-works-in-5-fascinating-facts

Collective intelligence is the concept of groups of people having collectively a better solution-making ability than the individual.

In a study of the TV show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, the audience had an accuracy rate that outperformed the experts 91% to 61%. https://blog.fieldagent.net/how-crowdsourcing-works-in-5-fascinating-facts

Smart phones have apps that are developed through crowdsourcing techniques. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced technology, with various people writing entries for topics and editing those entries. If an entry is wrong or needs updating, other parts of the crowd go in and “fix” those parts.

Unfortunately, sites like Wikipedia, being so unregulated, can be wrong at times. One way to fix this problem is to have a managed group of freelancers that come together and work on a problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Buyub6vIG3Q

Distributed knowledge is when you access the crowd to come up with and organize information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38uPkyH9vI

Hu Liang discussed crowdsourcing and collective intelligence in his TedTalk at this link: https://www.ted.com/talks/hu_liang_crowd_sourced_investing