Digital Directions - Summer 2013 - (Page 32)
Powering
THE Crowd
By_Michelle R. Davis
C
alifornia’s Poway Unified
School District tried an
experiment this year: district
officials used crowdsourcing
to find the best and most
innovative ways to improve
safety and security in the district.
Using a sophisticated online platform,
open to all of Poway’s 4,000 employees and
accessible via cellphones, tablets, PCs, and
other digital devices, the district challenged
staff members to contribute, discuss, and
evaluate new ideas for keeping staff members
and students safe and secure. The site
generated more than 10,000 page views,
about 500 comments, and nearly 1,000 votes
on 97 new ideas proposed. At the end of the
project, the district had a top-10 list of winning
ideas to pursue, that came from employees
as varied as a school counselor, an afterschool
program supervisor, and a bus driver.
The power of the site, and of the technique
of crowdsourcing via digital devices, is that it
provides more and better avenues for pitching
ideas to improve the district or build on the
suggestions of others, says Richard Newman,
the director II of learning-support services for
the 33,000-student district in San Diego.
“In school districts, innovation is generally
driven by the few and not the many. We really
needed to expand that,” Newman says. “We
wanted to equal the playing field and let the
best ideas win—not the loudest voices.”
The ability to access the crowdsourcing site
at any time of the day from a home computer,
smartphone, tablet computer, or other digital
32 >> www.digitaldirections.org
K-12 districts, education groups, and
companies deploy ‘crowdsourcing’
to identify better approaches
device boosted participation, he says.
Crowdsourcing in its contemporary form is
the use of technology to gather input from
large numbers of people. School districts,
education groups, and companies are
starting to use this approach in sophisticated
ways with a variety of technologies to do
everything from raising money for classroom
equipment to figuring out which social
studies lessons work best for students.
It harnesses the power of large groups of
people with vast and varied knowledge who
may be spread across the globe with no
other method of collaboration, says Daniel S.
Weld, a professor of computer science and
engineering at the University of Washington
who has studied the use of crowdsourcing in
education.
“The advantage is one of scale and the
ability to get a large number of people
anywhere on the planet with precisely the
same expertise and interests to contribute
together to something,” he says. “You can
also use it to gather large amounts of data
that can be analyzed.”
‘Perspective of the People’
Throughout the 2011-12 school year the
Mill Valley, Calif.-based Pearson Foundation, a
nonprofit education organization that receives
funding from the educational publishing giant
Pearson, used mobile phones as a tool to
collect crowdsourcing information for a series
of international challenges.
The challenges revolved around ways
to achieve the Education For All goals,
a UNESCO project aimed at improving
education in developing countries, says
Jenny Raymond, the director of international
programs for the foundation. The challenges
were hosted by the mobile-phone company
Nokia on its crowdsourcing platform and
covered such issues as how to improve
formal schooling, or strategies for educating
students with disabilities, she says.
Because mobile phones are the most
ubiquitous form of technology in many of the
areas that participated heavily—including
China, India, and some countries in Africa—
the project aimed to use them as the conduit
for collecting suggestions and information.
“We were reaching people who would be
affected by these solutions or who would
be implementing them on the ground,”
Raymond says. “It’s much better to get the
perspective of the people facing and solving
the challenges day to day, rather than us in a
conference room in California making these
decisions.”
In the Poway school district, officials
worked with the Pleasanton, Calif.-based
crowdsourcing company Spigit to design an
interactive website that could collect ideas
contributed by employees, create a socialnetworking aspect that allowed others to
expand and refine those contributions, and
let the ideas with the most support bubble
up to the surface.
Dubbed InnovationU, the site created four
tiers for ideas: freshman, sophomore, junior,
and senior. Concepts that got the most likes
and the most discussion progressed through
the levels. Contributors could add to existing
ideas, submit new ones, or create teams to
work on ideas.
The overall winning idea—to build a K-12
PAGE 34 >
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Directions - Summer 2013
Digital Directions - Summer 2013
Contents
Editor’s Note
DD Site Visit
Bits & Bytes
Test-Driving the Common Core
Flipped PD: Building Blocks to Success
Virtual Learning in the Early Years
Kindergarten the Virtual Way
7 Steps to Picking Your LMS
Cracking the Code
Powering the Crowd
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