WNYC has a Crowdsourcing Fieldguide. Nice.

Many classrooms are using it – students across a district, county, state, or around the world can gather and aggregate all kinds of information.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offers a kind of crowdsourcing – posting one’s project there can get many good sources/responses.

One guy described how crowdsourcing reports on Southern California wildfires kept him apprised of the condition of his house there while he was in Georgia.

Crowdsourcing relies on an existing network of attentive followers, whether it’s blog commenters, or twitter followers, or facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections.

Tanya Ott described the Get an Edit Facebook group to help freelancers get feedback and editing for their radio scripts.

TBD.com – new Washington DC website – is based on a sort of crowdsourcing model.

Crossposted at TimMerritt.net

That’s where I’ll be all day tomorrow! Much more to come, including much more regular stuff here on this very blog. No, really.

I just love how much free hype Apple’s gotten on this. Business majors and MBA candidates, rev up your graduate theses to analyze how they generate so much press mania (which most of you poor mutts will have to write in MSWord on a Windows machine). In the meantime, here’s a nicely done (and fairly plausible) wish-list for today’s announcement from Alchemist Muffin (because all the other good blog names were taken). Via Slashdot, via popurls.

Which news feed will you follow? I’m going to try several, but Fake Steve writes that he will live-blog the keynote Going to be a fun day.

I think jose. I do. I met him – only briefly – when he recorded an interview Ellen and I did last weekend at the National Storytelling Festival. The organizers of the festival were collecting peoples’ stories from their own experience in Jonesborough and at the festival over the years. The first time I went, 11 years ago, I had a memorable time and was part of a great onstage story. I’ll tell that tale here another time, but I want here to point to Jose’s site, which documents his many interests, achievements, and areas of expertise.

If you’re i his area, check him out, and if you’re not, check his site – there’s lots he knows about and can help you with.

Think Jose!

I saw some very engaging student projects while judging at the Festival—previous post here. There were 160 judges there, working into the afternoon judging several categories, all hosted in the facilities of Georgia Public Broadcasting.

I worked with an instructional technologist from Muscogee County and a library media specialist from Fulton County. We looked at several student-created web sites, most on CD and some online. Lots of good creative work, some were rather cookie-cutter, and one or two a bit misguided or unfortunately marred by broken links or missing images. I particularly liked the emphasis on citing sources as part of the projects. One nice resource I discovered is Weebly, a free website host for several of the projects. The sites I have seen had few ads, and not to distractingly placed. A nice find.

Encourage your students to participate in the festival in your school!

I am looking forward to working as a judge a the Georgia Student Media Festival on May 1st. They’ve posted several samples from last year’s Georgia festival. The International Student Media Festival is the goal of the Georgia competitors, and they have posted work from past winners. There are even more posted on SchoolTube
I signed up yesterday, and there’s lots of information on the site:

The purpose of the festival is to stimiulate student interest and involvement in all types of media production. This is accomplished by providing an opportunity for students to show their work to an interested audience, to have their work critiqued by a panel of expert judges, and to be stimulated by the work of other students.

The students worked really hard on the samples I’ve viewed, and I’ll watch more before the Festival. I’ll try to blog a bit from the competition, but more for sure on this the week after!

• I just finished listening to Peter H. Reynolds of Fablevision speak about inspiring students by being inspired, by being brave, original, active, and the fertile soil – what he calls the compost heap – of his hard drive, where he finds his pictures and stories. His stories The Dot and Ish (he showed the videos of each, created entirely in Flash) speak directly to the fear that stops inspiration, creativity, and action. He Was Me reminds us of the richness visible in the world if we’ll look at it with a child’s eyes, as we used to, and still can. In honor of him and how effective his presentation was, I actually drew a picture, smiling the whole time. You can bet I’ll do more of that.
• Yesterday I heard David Warlick inspire a packed room as he talked about and demonstrated web tools – blogs, wikis, and RSS – and how they can connect people, can track ideas, and foster creativity, citing Will Richardson in the audience as an exemplary edublogger who uses these tools. Setting up an organized batch of feeds can bring your web research to you, and even post it on your site for you as a reference. There was much more, of course.
• Will reminded me that he is leaving his teaching post for he doesn’t know what; a daring leap that frightens and excites me. I plan to buy his newly published book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms on “read-write web”. He’s really on the journey.
• Cheryl Lemke talked about tech solutions that work and authentic teaching, and its value (and for me, its honesty) in engaging students in learning
• Thomas Allison talked about how the video clips and other online tools at Discovery Networks’ unitedstreaming (yes, all one word, and all lowercase) and their “Discovery Educator Network”Lhttp://www.discoveryeducatornetwork.com/have changed the way he teaches and help him reach more students, and apparently raised his class’s science test scores 12 percent in a year.
• Wednesday’s full-day workshop with Glenda Gunter and Robert Kenny on “Digitally Mediated Storytelling”: demonstrated the impact of empowering students to tell their stories, and to use storytelling as a method for teaching anything. I look forward to exploring their UCF site Digital Booktalk.
• Jeffrey Boyer showed how digital storytelling has brought teachers together at his school (a developmental research school affiliated with the University of Florida), and has brought students of different grades together to teach each other (“tech buddies” for technology training), responding to bullying, student biographies, and more.