The Community-Sourced Human Intellect Experiment: The Ghost in the MOOC

Submitted a proposal to the June PSUWeb Conference for 2013 tonight. It is:

The Community-Sourced Human Intellect Experiment: The Ghost in the MOOC

“knowledge is not an object but a series of networks and flows…the new knowledge is a process not a product…it is produced not in the minds of individuals but in the interactions between people.” –Jane Gilbert, citing Manuel Castells

Addressing conceptual criticism that MOOCs are failing to cultivate the dynamics of genuine academic experience, this talk will emphasize the formative mechanics of “pleasurable experience” and “authentic community” and a more thoughtful address and blending of traditional models of education, for-profit competition and burgeoning interests and genuine possibilities in digital humanities. This “social” MOOC opens the process in 3 key areas:

1. Content –crowdsourced collection, transcription and translation, field recording, archiving and multimedia annotation.
2. Delivery Mechanism, shaping the structure and navigation –social tagging, indexing and self-organizing maps.
3. Evaluation –peer based accountability and calibrated grading.

This talk uses real world data and experience from cultivating, collecting and analyzing the intellectual energy from 16 years of evolution of mudcat.org, an online community and knowledge archive of folklore and traditional music origins and the creation and cultivation of community interaction with digital rhetoric multimedia content and synchronous and asynchronous participatory instruction of FreeWrite, under the aegis of the Philip K. Dick Digital Exegesis at zebrapedia.psu.edu and sponsored by the Penn State Department of English, Directed by Professor Richard Doyle in collaboration with Professor Trey Conner, USF.