Class 10 Reflection and the Turks

I wanted to use this space to reflect on the expert presentation by Eileen regarding the Mechanical Turk.

While I admit, I was still a bit confused about some of the details of the cone pt, term, website "mechanical turk". I visited Amazon's mechanical turk website and took a look at some of the projects. One I visited required you to trace the outline of a person in a picture and submit. It took about 30 minutes of work and appeared to pa 2cents per HIT.

From a workload/business perspective, I easily see the benefit and use of this model. If a person can break down complex, large tasks into simple steps and use a mass workload, the time saved is obvious. And if you're paying each person 2cents, it sounds like it might be an economic savings as well.

Applied to humanities, or complex concepts, as Eileen pointed out, small manageable pieces of the concept could be divided out. I feel that this is done is most cases in our classes in the ITEC program. When we divide into small groups and discuss a portion of a paper or a theory, we are focusing our attention. Then we re-join the larger group and try to put the pieces together.

The benefit of this manageable workload is efficiency, comprehension, and input of the human perspective. However, I also wonder about the costs. I see the largest challenge to this model being putting the individual pieces back together so that everyone learns how they fit together.

Again, using the small group models in class, while I feel that I get deeper perspective of the subject I have been assigned, I also tend to fade while other groups present their perspective. Of course, this may just be my own fault, however, I doubt that I'm alone in feeling the small picture becomes more clearer than the big picture.

I point this out just as a challenge and a point of interest when using the mechanical turk idea. Yes, I see clear benefits and as with anything there are of course challenges.

Would love to hear your thoughts.