Kayla's Final Essay #2: Revising the English Curriculum Based on Principles of Crowdsourcing

We may not stop often enough to consider the structure of literary study for undergraduates, assuming that any updating of the curriculum based on digital culture should be saved for higher-level study after students build a solid background in traditional studies, but this doesn’t need to be the case. One digital movement in particular—crowdsourcing—allows for the rethinking of literary studies in constructive ways. Crowdsourcing manifests itself in a range of places in the digital world, from starting virtual choirs to solving complex coding problems. Obstacles that seemed insurmountable before become manageable with the wisdom of the crowd.

Literary studies are often characterized in an isolated way, so crowdsourcing seems as though it may be the wrong solution for the lone scholar. These same students could benefit from applying the concepts of crowdsourcing to the English curriculum, however.

As it stands, students take mostly survey-type classes, being allowed to specialize somewhat in upper-level classes by choosing a narrower time period to study, but mainly staying in areas that give only a broad overview without getting into too many deep topics or specifics. While getting a broad literary education is also important, a portion of the major could benefit from allowing for what I will call “cluster classes,” which are similar to having an emphasis in some ways.

These cluster classes could be based around a certain topic but all cover different aspects of that topic. The classes, instead of being the usual isolated studies, would work together to create more of a “crowd” to tap the resources of. The media tools they choose to take advantage of (blogs, social media, etc.) are less important than their decision to collaborate. By working together in this way, students could still get the benefits of smaller class sizes with specialized attention given to certain topics, but their work would be much more beneficial to others and the program as a whole because it would contribute to the creation of more wide-reaching research.

This type of structure is already in existence and can especially be seen in the phenomenon of citizen journalism. Professional reporters can’t be everywhere, especially for unexpected breaking news, but citizens are already spread all over the world and can submit photos, videos, and even articles. Often, professionals and amateurs work together to create better content than either could have produced alone, and it all began with an open call for information about a certain event or topic.

Departments that deal with literary studies would be wise to follow such a model, allowing the professionals to coordinate the crowd, but still allowing the crowd to contribute in meaningful and novel ways. Undergraduates, like common citizens, may not have the training and expertise of professionals, but their zeal and numbers cannot be ignored.

            

How I (Kayla) Have Come to Understand Digital Culture

As a 21-year-old college student, it's easy to think that I was just born digital (and therefore don't need to make a focused study of digital culture). But while I may be a technology native in some ways, some of the main concepts of our study of digital culture have been new to me, or at least my conscious mind, this semester. I think everything can be tied back to interactivity and Web 2.0.

Now, things on the Internet are a lot less passive. We don't just consume, we also create and connect. My own project on citizen journalism grew out of this concept in a way. Since anyone can create content, I started to wonder how the crowd assigns value. It depends on the way we connect. Does an article shared through a social media platform have more value than one you find through an established news source? Sometimes, it does. You can see this series of blog posts to see the evolution of my thoughts from wondering about how we assign value to considering the pros and cons of assigning high value to citizen journalism to creating my guide to best practices in citizen journalism.

My project wasn't the only one that deals with creating and connecting in digital culture, however. In fact, it's hard to find a project that doesn't do that. In the beginnings of Kelsey's project, she realized how important metadata was and how applying tags really helped in searches. If creators are aware of their connections and users when they make their content, everything ends up being a lot more helpful for everyone. Amber created a blog of Moby Dick that took the static content of Moby Dick (think Web 1.0) and reformed it into something completely different (and with some elements of interactivity at that).

Even topics we highlighted in class all come back to the ideas of Web 2.0. We talked about LDS General Conference and the different ways people connected over the content. The hashtag #ldsconf trended around the world and people collaboratively shared notes in real time. Exploring these new ways of sharing gets people really excited. I remember when I first saw this video on the launch of a homemade spacecraft. My dad showed me and said, "Look, Kayla! You can see the curvature of the earth!" Things that excite people inspire them to create instead of simply consume. They see that even amateurs can make a device that can view the curvature of the earth.

As my fellow classmates and others in the digital world today have noticed, content gets better when more people contribute to it. There really is a wisdom to the crowd. Things that would have been impossibly large before become manageable when crowdsourced.

Web 2.0, besides being the basis for many of the digital culture concepts we covered during the semester, has also led to the improvement of the way the Internet serves us. There is so much we can learn from each other, and online interactivity lets everyone share their expertise (even for free!). Sometimes we criticize new technology and the media, but we shouldn't--if anything, now we are only criticizing ourselves.

Spiraling into Academic Blogging

After reading this post on academic blogging and this post on the spiral metaphor, I realized these concepts explained by Dr Burton go hand in hand. I'm just going to liken this to a spiral staircase because I'm visual like that.

The first part of our spiral staircase began in phase one. Each individual step was made up of our individual posts not necessarily consistently focused on one idea or theme. As we continue our climb up these steps to the second level right above the landing, we enter phase two of academic blogging. But we wouldn't have gotten to phase two without those steps in phase one. And we can climb back down the spiral stairs to look at points we made in phase one to carry with us in phase two. We develop our ideas. We use crowdsourcing (an idea we learned about in the first third of class, the first few steps of our spiral) and social proof (an idea we've just learned about) to get feedback and create a feedback loop.

(oops not stairs but you get the idea)

After we get public opinion (whether from our "homies, peers, enthusiasts, or experts") our spiral continues to grow into things phase three and beyond. I think what lies ahead can be daunting. You do get further and further away from the ground level as you climb up those spiral steps. But you can always step back down to refer to earlier notes, posts, links, and ideas to get your footing again.

Crowdsourcing with Moby Dick

Our Wednesday class talked about crowdsourcing - getting information/input for a task/project/idea by seeking out the services of people, paid or unpaid, on the Internet. I think it's such a coincidence because I was surfing the internet for ways people of today have incorporated Moby Dick into life today and came across this video. It's a group of guys called King Post appealing to people of the internet for funding of a Moby Dick card game! How fun is that? Crowdsourcing and the book we're studying all in one.

So I tried to get the link above to be a direct video to here, but I couldn't figure it out without using Youtube. So I searched Youtube to see if King Post had the same video on there. I found them but they didn't have this video. Instead they have a channel of information about the game and book. So not only are they crowdsourcing, but they are using different databases to get their message out to appeal to more people and get more viewers.

Their crowdsourcing got them the funding they needed to make their card game possible. This just shows the power of the internet and how effective this method is of getting your ideas out there and getting the support you need to make stuff happen!