Week4: Reading reflection
Wilson, M. C. (2018). Crowdsourcing and self-instruction: Turning the production of teaching materials Into a learning objective. Journal of Political Science Education, 14(3), 400-408. doi:10.1080/15512169.2017.1415813
Klašnja-Milićević, A., Vesin, B., & Ivanović, M. (2018). Social tagging strategy for enhancing e-learning experience. Computers & Education, 118, 166-181.
Randall, D. L., & West, R. E. (2020). Who cares about open badges? An examination of principals’ perceptions of the usefulness of teacher open badges in the United States. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 1-19.
These are the three articles I read this week. All of them were interesting but I especially liked how deeply Randall & West investigated the badge system and the idea of crowdsourcing in education. I have a story to share about crowdsourcing so I think I can get started with that first.
South Korea is a largely homogeneous society and all the public elementary schools follow the national curriculum, although individual teachers have extensive autonomy to redesign the curriculum considering their local context. This feature allowed teachers to actively share materials as all the schools were basically teaching the same thing. If a teacher had a really great idea about how to decorate a classroom, how to build a morning routine, or how to help students meaningfully fill up their spare time, crowdsourcing begins. The platform mostly used here is 'iScream', as it is a specialized online shopping mall for elementary schools. I remember buying materials such as morning routine notes and an emotional check-in magnetic board, all designed by current in-service teachers with brilliant ideas. I really appreciated the opportunities i-Scream provided individual teachers to disseminate their ideas and benefit more teachers.
However, there is a voice that is concerned about how influential i-Scream is to current public elementary education in South Korea. i-Scream also provides digital curation for curriculum and private education content. Even though a teacher decided to purchase the crowdsourced products only because it is developed by a current in-service teacher and fits what she needed in her classroom, parents will see the logo of 'i-Scream' on the product and naturally think that i-Scream is such a reliable company that it is even openly used by public elementary education. Now parent wants to enroll their child in a private online learning platform for extracurricular learning and they have several options- Daekyo, Kumon, Woongjin, and i-Scream. Which one do you think they will choose?
I think i-Scream is doing a really meaningful business for teachers, to make their ideas feasible and more accessible. But I feel that public elementary teachers rely on i-Scream more and more as time goes by. I remember when I substituted other teachers, there were always the teachers' i-Scream ID and password on the manual sheet so that I could access all the resources (curated by i-Scream, not the teacher) needed for that day's lesson. Of course, people choose what's better, but is it always better? I think the relationship between i-Scream and Korean elementary education is very complicated.
Besides that, I'd like to note that I really appreciated the paper about open badges. Unlike most cases, in the study, the badge carried real meaning as a college credit. However, other badges that I usually have seen in game-based learning environments were only for showing off or for personal satisfaction. Also, it was interesting to dig deeper into the badge's interrelations and functions for learning behaviors. I feel that I will come back to this paper sooner or later.
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