Web2.0 Learning Lab

  One thing that immediately came to mind while reading Randall and West's article of open badges was a question I have always had about résumés. Whenever I read a résumé, I find myself wondering: How do we know any of this is true? Of course, I'm not suggesting that people are lying. But résumés are fundamentally self-descriptions. No one is humble on it. Someone can write that they are an excellent leader, a strong communicator, or an innovative problem solver, and there is often very little evidence attached to those claims. Among colleagues, I've occasionally joked that the person on a résumé and the person in real life can feel like two completely different people. This is probably one reason why graduate programs and employers often ask for recommendation letters. They provide an external perspective and help validate some of the claims made by applicants. Even so, I've always felt there are still gaps in the process. Recommendation letters are subjective, and not...

 One thing I appreciated about this week's crowdsourcing reading by Zhao and Zhu was that it anticipated the exact questions I found myself asking while reading it. My first reaction was simple: Isn't this just outsourcing? Then, a few pages later, another question followed: Isn't this basically open source? The article addressed both comparisons directly, which made the concept much easier to understand. At a surface level, outsourcing and crowdsourcing do share some similarities. Both involve seeking solutions from outside an organization, and both can rely on incentives to motivate participation. In some crowdsourcing contexts, participants even compete to provide the best solution, much like vendors competing for a contract. What stood out to me, however, was one key distinction: outsourcing typically involves a pre-selected provider, whereas crowdsourcing begins with an open call to an undefined crowd. Rather than inviting a specific company to solve a problem, org...