Project Classroom Makeover Analysis

In “Project Classroom Makeover”, Cathy Davidson demonstrates the potential benefits that can come from the implementation of technology in the current educational paradigm. She does this by describing the iPod experiment, a crowdsourcing experiment in which Duke university students received free iPods if they were able to use the iPods in their classes. Furthermore, in Sherry Turkle’s “Selections from Alone Together”, Turkle discusses the unique relationship between a child and his or her artificially intelligent toys, some of which include Tamagotchis and Furbies. Interestingly, children give these toys special treatment relative to other toys. Although some children treat their toys in an unethical way, they have the potential to

Although the toy was supposed to be as realistic as possible, when the baby was “hurt…it shut down” (Turkle 477). Therefore, there is “no cost” for hurting the baby, which means that there is no reinforcement for when the fake baby gets hurt or damaged (Turkle, 477). Many believe that lack of reinforcement can “enable sadistic behavior” (Turkle, 476). In addition, when individuals were testing the My Real Baby toy, the experiments were often similar to miniature crowdsourcing experiments. According to Davidson, a crowdsourcing experiment must encourage “difference and diversity”, should not “predict the result”, and “the community...should be chiefly involved in the process of finding [the solution]” (Davidson, 51). In one of the experiments, a child named Alana was mistreating the toy because she believed that it had “no feelings” (Turkle, 477). Due to her mistreatment, another child named Scott stole the toy because he believed that the “My Real Baby is like a baby...I don’t think she wants to get hurt” (Turkle, 477). In this experiment, there were “a range of responses” from responses like Alana’s to responses like Scott’s (Turkle, 477). Thus, this experiment satisfies the first requirement of crowdsourcing, difference and diversity, due to its diverse outcomes. Moreover, the children were given My Real Babies, but were not given any objectives to complete except for playing with the toy. Therefore, the experimenters did not predict anything, but rather just exposed the children to the toys. This is similar to how the iPod was given to the Duke University students without any objectives except for “[dreaming] up learning applications”, or in other words, playing with the iPod to see how they can creatively use