May 9, 2008...3:00 am
Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus
In this article by Clay Shirky, Shirky advances the argument that participatory media technologies are allowing us to harness the cognitive surplus we’ve been wasting all of these years on TV. His new book, “Here Comes Everybody” is a longer version of this argument. He estimates that wikipedia represents about 100 Million man hours of investment.
If your company ever has to produce and distribute training materials, you may wish to think about using a participatory medium such as a wiki or comment board in order to get your people involved.
Think about it: You have a team of 6 instructional designers and Subject Matter Experts responsible for creating “THE PERFECT TRAINING” they spend months trying to get it right. In a fraction of the time, you could have posted it online and said, “hey everybody, what do you think?” and the crowd would go to work perfecting your material. It sounds bizarre, but it works. It’s called crowdsourcing.
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