New Crowdsourcing Sites Provide New Learning Opportunities
Some interesting new crowdsourcing sites are geared towards sharing knowledge.
As Wikipedia has proved there is a large demand for well-organized information on almost any topic, opportunities abound for similar tools. MentorMob.com launched recently with the goal of helping “anyone learn virtually anything by providing a repository of cultivated, crowdsourced educational content organized into step-by-step instruction.”
Described as the first free, community-powered site of its kind, it aims to help users cut through the clutter of Internet content by aggregating and organizing online educational content, making it quick and easy to learn a new skill, hobby or technique without wasting time searching all over the Internet. MentorMob community members sort through all the content, choose the best snippets and lace them together into a step-by-step course.
Another new site is providing learning opportunities for not only users but the computer scientists who developed the program. With PlateMate, anyone upload a snapshot of their meal and get a nutrition analysis from other users. The site was developed by computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Research found PlateMate’s calorie estimates to be just as accurate as those of trained nutritionists, and more accurate than the user’s own logs. According to developers, the project proves that a well-managed crowd can play the role of an expert, and that opens the door to a wealth of new opportunities.
“Estimating the nutritional value of a meal is a fairly complex task, from a computational standpoint, but with a structured workflow and some cultural awareness, we’ve expanded what crowdsourcing can achieve,” said a program developer. “What makes the nutrition application so interesting as a problem in crowdsourcing is that computers are so very far away from doing it on their own—because food is such a human thing.”
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