What does Ushandi, a global "acitvist mapping" project, and LOLCats have in common? They are both forms of cognitive surplus, discussed by Clay Shirky in "How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World". Cognitive surplus is the world's ability to help people and participate in worldwide projects. This requires both our free time and talent, as well as our tendency to create and share. There is a difference between the two aforementioned projects and that is that Ushandi is civic, while LOLCats is communal. Meaning that LOLCats is restricted to those who chose to look at them, and Ushandi involves everyone, not just those who participate it in. Ushandi's creation also involves another term that Shirky found very important, and that is crowd-sourcing. After a controversial election in Kenya, there was a media blackout, and a sole blogger could not handle all the information to be reported. Crowd-sourcing invites the public to help create a new technology to carry out the desired task. The blogger, Ory Okolloh, crowd-sourced, and the result was cognitive surplus, that created Ushandi and has spread into multiple global projects. Shirky is very passionate about how the public masses can come together using technology to create new things. Just as our scheduled guest speaker Yong Lee is passionate about teaching people how technology is useful in the classroom through the Soical Media Club Education Connection. Andi showed us an example with GoogleDocs, and how you can edit group projects together from remote areas. This is especially useful since we all have such busy schedules these days and it can be hard to get an entire group to meet in person. With the use of technology and people coming together, great ideas can really become a reality
Well done!
ReplyDelete