The machine really is us

Today I worked for the machine. By playing a simple game, I contributed to what the machine knows. Last week, I saw videos from Wesch that made the statement that the machine is us/ing, and I pondered that and figured that it connected to the way we tag blogs or how we search for things. I played a few games of google image labeler yesterday before I left my office, and I sort of glossed over the purpose behind doing the game...instead I was focused on how well I could do at the game.

This morning, I took a sick day and decided I was going to actually going to get caught up today. I got a chance to watch the lecture video about how simple online games can be used to do the work for the machine- simple things like google image searchs could become more accurate based on people playing these games. I was surprised by how many hours are wasted by people playing solitaire, but then again, I often find myself playing it as well when I'm watching tv or just bored. I think a good point was made by pointing out that these wasted hours could be put into doing something productive for internet searches and pictures while still being a game.

Since the class has defined web 2.0 as something that is very social and collaborative in nature, this game of labeling makes sense. The uses of having people do the work is something that I could defiinitely see transferring well into education. On a smaller scale, I approached the head of my department yesterday to fill her in on the possibility of using google documents to work on a standard syllabus for our department (a problem that we have been trying to find a solution for for awhile). But, now that I think about it, in the English department alone, there are tons of ways that having a "game" could help to determine outcomes. Having a game available to submit sentences/paragraphs from one's paper and then having people from around the world pick out grammar errors might be really great to teach about proofreading and also help to pinpoint common grammar errors that people are prone to making with the English language. This would, in turn, allow me to adjust what I teach in some of the basic writing classes. I tend to stick to certain grammar topics as a whole (e.g. commas), but if I could determine that students tend to have more problems with introductory commas and not really serial commas, I could adjust accordingly.

And the speaker was absolutely right...I felt a huge sense of accomplishment this morning when I was able to break 1000 points on google labeler. I couldn't help cheering, which in turn got my husband interested, and now he is labeling for the machine/us.