Jerry Kane on “Wisdom”

http://profkane.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/the-parameters-of-wisdom/

I think Professor Kane’s post is thought provoking in two ways:

1. This class has created a conflict between traditional learning styles to which most students have become accustomed and a collaborative learning environment this course promotes.

2. Is popularity equal to quality?

1.  I’ve been personally struggling with the style of presentation in the class, and for good reason.  It’s different that what we’ve had in the past in virtually every class we’ve taken.  Is different better? Is different worse?  Well, in this class we rely heavily on the contributions of students in the class.  We create the content, Prof. Kane creates the structure, facilitates the conversations and makes the backbone powerpoints.  While in some cases it may just be a saying, in this class, we make the class good or bad, it’s up to us.   In a class of relative newbies, and a Professor with expertise, we rely heavily on the class to contribute… which is much different than a normal lecture and problem set class.  In adoption of this format, we’ve seen some unintended consequences.  The Web 2.0 environment tries to be self-policing, but generally that requires experts who have ownership.   So this raises the questions, who owns the class? Who feels responsible for the content?  Is the class sufficiently large to be a “crowd”? How much can we rely on learners to be experts as well? I don’t have the answers to these questions…but it seems to be food for thought.

2. As Jerry’s post says, we reward students for popular content, which in this case is a proxy for valuable content.  Jerry’s stated that the combination of presentation in class and the blog posts/weekly assignments have created an issue that he may correct.  However, maybe this shows a point in the web 2.0 environment that we hadn’t really challenged in class.  We’ve accepted that in general the crowd can filter the “junk” and figure out the gems.

Is that what we’re doing? Is that what the crowd does in practice?

It really depends on the purpose of the crowd.  We’ve got 30-40 MBA students participating in a collaborative class in which most are taking this class primarily because it’s required.   We have varying levels of participation, varying levels of commitment to the class, and varying expertise in the field… all good for our crowd experiment (diversity is not quite random…it is an MBA class).  This is just hearsay, because I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I would say we as a crowd tend to vote for blog posts based on entertainment value rather than educational value (a post can be both, they are not exclusive).

This isn’t necessarily an anomaly, as entertainment is an important piece of the value of web 2.0.  Why? Because we all know what’s entertaining, and in that realm we’re probably pretty homogenous.  So in this case, we’re rewarded implicitly for educational posts (Jerry’s mention in class), but explicitly for entertaining posts (bonus points based on vote).  Can we achieve both?  Sure, but it’s easier to post a youtube video of a singing guy on the virtues of facebook.

Our class should value those posts that are both entertaining (because we don’t want to be bored to death) and educational (we’re paying for the class).  My attitude tends to be more towards the educational, but I can see why entertaining stuff should be valued as well.