Why can’t we work together?
Winners and losers, Democrats and Republicans, guns and butter, good and evil… The world appears to be locked in competition.
OK, I’m straying off my Scratch demo plan for this post. What made me start thinking about this? I’ve started getting some “spam” comments on my blog here… not a lot… no big problem… just a nuisance. I remembered that I had to enter some sort of code when I posted a comment over on Wesley Fryer’s ”Speed of Creativity” blog. By the way, I strongly recommend Wes’ latest blog entry about President Bush’s comments on NCLB during his State of the Union Address - read it here. Anyway, I browsed over to Speed of Creativity and found that Wes uses reCAPTCHA to block spam comments.
My first thought was, I wonder how much this costs? So I checked it out at http://recaptcha.net/. It’s free… and beyond that it’s a 2-way win! Carnegie Mellon provides reCAPTCHA free - to help people avoid spam and to aid in the digitization of old books. When you post a comment, you are presented with images of 2 words. These words have been scanned during the process of scanning books. The left is known to reCAPTCHA. The right is not known (i.e. The Optical Character Recognition process could not decode the word and it needs to be manually corrected). If you enter the first word correctly, reCAPTCHA believes you are a person (not some sort of bot program) and allows your post to go through. It also assumes you have entered the second word correctly. After the second word has been decoded by a certain number of people (on various websites using reCAPTCHA), it is considered to have been corrected. Assuming there are thousands (maybe millions?) of words that need to be manually corrected, how much time is saved by reCAPTCHA? I’m glad to both be helped by reCAPTCHA and to help them in their efforts by implementing it on this blog!
School is not centered on cooperation (IMHO) - school is more centered around competition. (Alfie Kohn has several good articles on Competition and Cooperation on his web site… read them here.) Are there ways that educational technology can be used to generate (or encourage) a win-win situation - like reCAPTCHA does - in the classroom? I’ll be thinking about this some… and hopefully come up with some good ideas. If a reader has any ideas, I’d love to hear them!