1. The words in the passage that were most confusing to me were crowdsourcing and credentialing. The dictionary definition of crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Credentialing is the process by which the eligibility of an entity for a particular job or task is established by determining if the entity has the specified qualifications and fulfills the defined requirements. The implication of the use of crowdsourcing in this passage is that those using crowdsourcing are not focused on finding experts, but rather just anyone able and willing to help. They suggest that experts are somewhat narrow-minded and sway the reader to lean towards the idea that crowdsourcing is better. In this passage, credentialing appears to be the less desirable method. The passage claims that, "the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we even conceive to be the problem let alone the answer." In this context, the passage seems biased against credentialing and favors crowdsourcing.
2. "While formal education typically teaches hierarchies of what's worth paying attention to, crowdsourcing works differently, in that it assumes that no one of us individually is smarter than all of us collectively." This sentence was not necessarily confusing to me, but rather it was more thought provoking. Throughout the country and even the world, standards are set for education. Teachers are told what they should teach us, and we are told what we should know and what we should think is important. For instance, we are often told to focus on the sciences and math while more creativity based subjects like art and writing are pushed aside and deemed less important, hence the hierarchy. In crowdsourcing, everyone works together and pools together their different skills. No one is more important than anyone else and no one skill is more valuable because everyone is contributing to something bigger. Everyone needs each others' skills in order to succeed. The hierarchy that once deemed what was important and what was unnecessary is now irrelevant.
3. The first and last sentence are related because the first sentence points out how different crowdsourcing is from credentialing, and the last sentence further elaborates on the effects of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing allows people, even experts, to learn more. No one is perfect and no one knows absolutely everything there is to know, so there is always room to grow and learn.
4. "The girl with the green hair has special skills that show up nowhere on her compulsory EOG state tests, on which she continues to score poorly. 'Your work is worth more than mere congruence to an answer key.' This girl's talents don't count on those tests, and yet she has a special and valued ability the cannot be replaced by a computer program. The problem is that her fate is to a large extent controlled by her performance on the EOG tests, and unless the adults in her life - teachers and parents - are resolute in shepherding her along a path where her talents are valued, they may ultimately wind up undeveloped" (pg. 63). I think an important word in this passage is the word "shepherding." The current standards of education steer us toward a very specific path, and anyone who deviates from that path must be guided. The way our education system is set up, it makes it very easy for the "brainy" math and science kids to succeed, while the more "artsy" kids are often viewed as less intelligent and need a lot more guidance to do well. These students often feel like failures because they're doing poorly on tests and feel out of place. For example, on page 63 the author detailed her own struggles. No matter how hard she tried, she simply could not memorize the preamble and the Gettysburg Address. It wasn't until her teacher designed a new assignment for her that she could succeed. This is important to the passage as a whole because it really exemplifies the flaws in our education system. Duke was heavily criticized for their educational iPod experiment and accused of pulling a publicity stunt when they were simply trying to find new, better ways to educate their students. Our system is so deeply rooted in the past, it looks down on anything unconventional and dismisses it as unimportant or incorrect. Our education system needs to be more willing to accept change and be more flexible to accommodate for students who learn differently than the general population.
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