Rubbish
There’s a bunch of stuff I want to write about O2Learn and Jamie’s Dream Teachers, but since we’ve entered the latter I should probably be careful. At least for now.
One thing I did just tweet, however, is this:
Crowd-sourced rubbish is still rubbish. Don’t waste people’s time with it unless you’re offering quality as well.
In this context: don’t waste teachers’ time with crap resources, even if they’ve made them themselves. It’s a waste of a precious resource (ie. teacher time), and you’ll build neither audience nor participation that way.
There are, I think, three alternatives:
- Quality, then scale.
Set a standard, establish a form, then invite contributions. I guess this is what we’re trying with the Physics Demonstration Films. - Nurture, guide, shape.
Your project isn’t about ‘user-generated content’, it’s about investing editorial effort with a wide network of collaborators. Example: compare YouTube, which is full of cats falling in swimming pools and ripped-off TV shows, and Vimeo, which is full of exquisitely-crafted films made by talented directors. I caricature both sites, but you get the point. - Don’t take it too seriously.
Be playful; reward attention by entertaining; keep your utilitarian goal at arm’s length, let people have fun, and trust that where there’s joy there’s value.
I reckon I took all three approaches with SciCast, to varying extents. It’s deliberately silly and playful, and I spent much of the first year of the project on the road running workshops in schools, partly to kick the project off with the ‘right’ sorts of films but also to help judge what kind of support our contributors would need. We’ve done less of the latter than I’d like, but then, we’ve only ever run on a skeleton staff.
All this boils down to one thing: if you’re looking to run a resource site based on contributed content, it’s not about participation and the stuff people give you, it’s about the editorial approach and support you offer to them.