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Corrective Collectives

http://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/ is every tennis fanatics dream! This forum-site contains thousands of posts from the tennis community on information of everything tennis. This includes current tennis news for all levels of play, tennis equipment release dates, tennis equipment reviews, tennis equipment for sale, tennis tips, stringing and so much more. It is everything you need for a tennis “nut”. This website was made from the actual company tenniswarehouse, which sells tennis equipment. All you need to sign up to join and help out fellow tennis people is a valid e-mail address.

This project definitely meets Henry Jenkins definition of collective intelligence because it is basically a community of tennis “nuts” posting, editing, and adding information about everything tennis to supplement people knowledge of anything they need related to tennis. The aim of this collective intelligence project is to allow tennis fans all over to world to help out each other. Whether it is a review of a certain tennis racquet or some tips on how to hit a good forehand, this site has people coming together for each other. A personal experience from me was that there was a new tennis racquet from Babolat that came out and I wanted to know how it was before I spent 200 bucks in case I didn’t like it. So I logged into my account and I searched for the racquet and I found out the specific details of how it played. I really liked what I read so I bought it and I have been using it ever since. Another time my good friend asked me if I tried this string called Sonic Pro. I told him I hadn’t and that he should check the website to see a review. He checked the site, found a review and he ended up loving the string!

This site also has monitors to make sure everything stays appropriate and only relates to tennis. I know this site does an excellent job of meeting these aims because I know hundreds of people from Hawaii who use this site for information on current professional matches, review on a specific string, and much, much more. There are several thousand users and this site has been around for years. This site has relations to the actual professional website of atptennis.com. They work together to provide accurate information of whatever is posted. There is also a monitor who goes over each post to make sure it is accurate. If you love tennis and need help in anything related to tennis or just even have a simple question, http://tt.tennis-warehouse.com is where it is at. Sign up today and it will make life so much easier!

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Are you a pinner?

Pinterest is a beautiful example of collective intelligence, in that it is a huge pool of information that anyone around the world can access. It is a search engine for anything and everything you could ever want to know how to do, how to cook, where your next vacation destination will be, outdoor/indoor decorations, the newest fashion trends, gift ideas, quotes about life, death, friendship, and the list could go on. It’s a women’s paradise, and quite time consuming as well as distracting if I do say so myself. All ideas are shared by individuals that post them onto the Pinterest site and then members can pin their interests as well as organize them in whichever way they please. To become a member, it is free! …You give them your email address and then they confirm you, and you’re ready to pin! It’s basically just giving you access to an online pinboard, where you organize the things that you want to remember. People can also comment on these things and give back feedback as well.

Jenkins feeding off Levy’s idea of a “knowledge community” described as what we cannot know or do on our own – we now are able to collectively is exactly what Pinterest brings to our life. It serves as a sight for unanswered questions that brings convention and innovation to the table as Jenkins talks about. It is a way to channel this huge variety of knowledge, creation, and development with out any additive comprehension, which he also mentions. You can enter this site at anytime with out any mandatory previous knowledge. I think that this project meets every aspect of Jenkins idea as well as it’s effectiveness of what it is there for in the first place… being to collect and spread creative ideas, and collect intelligence that you didn’t have before.

This site is compared to many other sites on the web including Tumblr, Flickr and other photo based sites, but I think it’s closest relationship, would be Etsy. It’s almost the same exact idea but the difference is, these things that you “pin” on Pinterest… you can actually buy them on Etsy. It has a lot of the same concepts, but I feel that Etsy is obviously better for independent sellers for the fact that you can buy these objects you desire to have.

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Goodreads: Cool Story, Bro

In his book, Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins cites Pierre Levy's definition of collective intelligence as "the ability of virtual communities to leverage the knowledge and expertise of their members, often through large-scale collaboration and deliberation (321). In this tradition, many review sites are very much in-tune with Levy's interpretation in the sense that the experiences and knowledge of their respective users coalesce in one place so that other members can gain a better understanding of foreign phenomena, like new movies or must-play video games.

Goodreads.com is one such website where members can offer their insight on various forms of literature (mostly novels). Here members can discuss a number of topics such as plot, symbolism, characters, and ultimately if a particular book is worth anyone's time of day. The site is structured as a sort of social network and can also integrate activity from your Facebook account into your goodreads account. You make a friends list, compile a library of the books you read, read their reviews, start a book club, and can even recommend books to your friends. The entire experience is geared towards promoting literature through both contemporary media and good ol' fashioned word of mouth. There's even a goodreads app out there too so you can take the whole site with you on the go. Because of this level of accessibility and general ease of use, the site is fairly successful in its goals. Since its launch in December of 2007, the site has grown to over 12 million members and continues to reach new ones everyday through its ever-expanding library of titles.

Additionally, it now features an authors program where published (or soon to be published) writers can start a blog and connect with their fans. Authors can also recommend other books that they've enjoyed with their fans as well so that they can share their sources of inspiration to their followers.

Goodreads is a great resource for book lovers such as myself. I used to work at a Borders before things went terribly, terribly wrong there, so I was used to being on the forefront of book news. But now that those days are gone and I no longer have access to that kind of information, goodreads has proven to be a healthy substitute. Not just in the sense that I have a better idea of what kind of book I want to read next, but in the sense that there are now new ways for people to interact with literature given the changing times and the question of the cultural relevancy of the institution that is your neighborhood bookstore.

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"You Are Still the Mayor!"

I love going to new places. But, there's always that fear of "what if it's a waste of time or money?" Never fear, Foursquare is here!...or at least it is on your smartphone. The app is a mixture of Yelp and a modern capture the flag.

Here are the rules: Members can check-in at locations and leave tips for other users. Each check-in has a point value and count towards your total check ins for that particular place. Whoever checks in the most at the location during the span of two months becomes the mayor of that location. Check ins can also unlock special badges. You can also earn badges by following featured members like MTV, Bravo, or Ellen.

The aim of the project is to connect users with their own communities, others around the world, and other users. Within the app, you can share pictures and even sync your account will other social media outlets as a way to share your check ins with your friends.

Foursquare is huge on the mainland. When I went to New York and would check in somewhere, there would be at least 20 other people that were checked in too. The tips are more in depth and were very helpful. Being able to use this app in an unfamiliar city was very helpful. It aided in myself and my family in finding good places to eat, entertainment venues and even shopping specials. I hope that in the future more people in the state will find out about and use Foursquare.

Anyone with a Wifi device can become a member. Membership is totally free and so is the app. You can even invite your own friends to join, either by word of mouth or by e-mail. Once you become a member, you can sync it to your e-mail and Facebook account to see if any of your friends are members as well.

Each year Foursquare hosts an event called The Hackathon. They invite tech savy individuals from around the country to participate in an app making contest. The contest goes on for the span of about three to four days. At the end, each team shares their new creation with a panel of judges and their peers. Then, ballots are cast and the winners are posted on the Foursquare blog. Some of the winning apps are available to download right away. While others use the backing of Foursquare to finance the creation of the actual app.

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Rate My Professors

RateMyProfessors.com is a site that has become a very important part of the choosing-the-right-professor process of college. This free site provides ratings for 1.7 million professors over 8,000 schools from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Rate My Professors is a site made for college students, by college students, but professors are allowed to join the site as they are then able to "respond" to the comments and ratings that they receive from their previous/current students. The membership, however, is different for professors than it is for students, as professors require a Certified Professor Account from Rate My Professors. Students provide school information and up to 20 professors that they have taken or are taking now upon creating their account.

Henry Jenkins defines Pierre Levy's term of collective intelligence as "the ability of virtual communities to leverage the knowledge and expertise of their members, often through large-scale collaboration and deliberation" (Jenkins, 321). Rate My Professors meets this definition very well, in that it is a virtual community where college students use their expertise in knowing what kind of professors are good to take, which are good to avoid, and provide knowledge in the form of comments as to why the professors were given certain ratings. The aim of this collective intelligence project is to allow college students to do what they've always done - find out from friends, siblings, sibling's friends, and anyone else about the best professors to take and which professors to avoid - but on a bigger scale. This bigger "arena" allows for a more 'well-rounded' review of each professors, especially if there are a lot of ratings and comments for that professor.

With the availability of professors to respond to the students comments and ratings, there is a chance to see both sides of the story. But, more often then not, the students have these professors figured out from the beginning, showing that college students really are experts when it comes to knowing what kind of professor is the right fit for students - with a few exceptions. Rate My Professors has met this aim, with 15 million student comments to date and over 4 million college students visiting the site monthly. Personally, I haven't met one student who doesn't use Rate My Professors, and I know many who are members, including myself.

Bibliography:

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York University Press: NY, 2008.

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RateMyProfessors.com (Corrective Collectives)

I'm sure every college student has heard of or used RateMyProfessors.com at one point in time or another. This website provides an online rating system for students to rate their class professors in categories such as easiness, helpfulness, clarity, rater interest, and even hotness. Real students from all over the world connect to others by inputting their experiences and thoughts about a professor for other students to use to decide if they want to take that professor's class or not. Usually, students will use this rating system to find a professor or class that is most ideal to them. Even before this project was created, students would ask other peers to see which professors/classes to take and which ones to avoid. But now with this website rating system, students have even more access to other opinions and thoughts about classes from all over the world.

RateMyProfessors.com meets Jenkins' definition of collective intelligence by allowing students around the globe to share their thoughts, opinions, and experiences on an online rating system that is accessible to anyone who has internet connection. With each additional comment/feedback, users are better informed on a class and/or professor that they can use to ultimately make the decision of enrolling in that class or not. This is especially useful when your college offers the same course, but it is taught by different professors. Every student has their own learning style and based on these types of reviews, students can now pick a professor based on that or any other reason for that matter. Even though these reviews can sometimes be biased based on the student's grade in the class, it is always better to have some type of review than nothing in my opinion.

In my own experience, RateMyProfessors.com has been quite accurate for the most part. I've noticed that with more reviews, comes more accuracy. This is because the ratings for each category are averaged and the comments are more or less the same. This website has helped me avoid some teachers that are known to be either very hard or hard to learn from so I'm glad we have the technology available to have made this happen.

To become a member on this site, all you have to do is create an account by creating a username, password, and enter in the college you attend. Membership allows you to do basic things such as rate professors, leave comments, and do other things related. Even professors are allowed to create accounts for themselves to check on their own teacher reviews. This can be a good and bad thing based on the professor/teacher. Professors can use these reviews to improve the way they engage with their students, but they can also get offended if the reviews aren't positive comments about them. Although I do believe some of these reviews get screened if they violate certain restrictions mentioned on the site when membership was created. The site is very user friendly and can easily be navigated by anyone who has even touched a computer before.

Overall, I find this rating system very useful for any student in college. I've used it for years and have found this a very useful resource as a student. Although not always accurate, this site has helped me dodge certain professors and classes where I might not have done very well. I believe that this site has great potential and will only get better as more feedback gets submitted to the database.

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Corrective Collectives: The Climate CoLab

In Henry Jenkins book "Convergence Culture" he writes about media convergence and uses Pierre Lévy's statement that "No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity" when he is writes about collective intelligence (p.26-27). Lévy also says that these communities allows for "collective discussion, negotiation, and development" and that this highlights topics in need of solutions (p.27).

One collective intelligence project found online is the Climate CoLab which focuses on the alarming issue of global warming and its effects on our planet. The aims of the project is to create a forum where people from around the world can discuss ideas and create proposals about what we can do about the climate changes that are occurring today. The ultimate goal is to develop a solution and actions to be taken against this pressing issue. The project allows for proposals to be discussed and judged in a type of competition where the winner is allowed to present their idea to the United Nations and the U.S. congress1. The ideas are reviewed from many different points of views and are then considered by the authorities before taken into action. So far, one winner each year has presented their suggestions and in for example 2011, the winning contestant proposed lowered meat consumption and transformation of grazing land into forest in order to lower the carbon and methane emissions which contributes to global warming2. Anyone with an interest in climate change can become a member of Climate CoLab3 leading to an online meeting point where ideas can be discussed. The project started in 2009 and has since then presented different ideas addressing what can be done to reduce the climate change, where it should be done and who should be doing it. The proposals from the Climate CoLab have been presented to authorities and it is now up to them to take action. Climate CoLab has relationships with the National Science Foundation, MIT and Argosy Foundation which promotes biological diversity. They all work together, in cooperation with other institutions promoting sustainability and nature.

This type of collective intelligence gathers opinions and expertise from members around the world, both from people that just comes up with good ideas and also from experts within the field of climate. By gathering the knowledge in this way a solution may be close if Lévy's statement that all knowledge is to be found in humanity is correct.

Resources: 1. http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/the-climate-colab-crowdsourcing-goes-green/8186

2. http://unfccc.int/press/news_room/newsletter/items/6847.php

3. http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/members

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Abolish Global Warming

There are many projects on the web that deal with collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is said to be a “theory that describes a type of shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decisions making in bacteria, animals, and computer networks.” Collective intelligence can be applied to politics, environmental problems, and even social capitalism. The collective intelligence problem I found on the Internet is a research project done at Massachusetts Institute of Technology about global climate change. Why is this project considered to be a collective intelligence project? Global warming could quite possibly be one of the most critical issues facing society today. It is a problem that will affect all of us and is an extremely complex issue. This problem will only be able to be fixed if we can all come together to form a solution and then all work at it together. It must be a collective, global decision. The goal of this project is to tackle this challenge of global warming through the “creation of a new class of web-mediated discussion and decision making forum called CoLab.” Since this project is still in effect and happening today, there is no clear answer to what the most effective plan was/is. However, so far there has not been a very clear or coherent plan that is set up to start and happen all over the world. There have been many scattered plans among us but none that have brought everyone together to solve the problem of global warming. The plan is to incorporate the internet to allow people from all over to communicate with each other and take down global warming. In this “internet-mediated interaction,” participants will generate a pool of ideas, simulate these ideas with a computer program and share these ideas and simulations for feedback among people from all over the world. This program does not have one set list of people that will be allowed to join this group because it is meant to be a global project. Like stated earlier, this problem is linked to everyone and in order for this problem to be fixed, everyone must contribute and try to demolish global warming. Global warming will not be resolved if everyone does not participate. The institution in association with this project is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project manager is Robert Laubacher with help from Thomas Malone, John Sterman, Hal Abelson, and Joshua Introne. I think this project could potentially be the turning point in global warming and environmental stressors because it brings people together from all over the world to one meeting place—the internet. I think this is a new approach that could possibly be the beginning of many other activist sites like this one.

http://cci.mit.edu/research/climate.ht

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