Live like a jellyfish

This week, I read Tyrrell and Shalavin’s (2022) paper about crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is based on the idea of 'collective intelligence.' It suggests that when a group of people works together, they can make smarter decisions than one genius. In this era with diverse perspectives, this sounds like a fair way to listen to everyone's thoughts. However, this paper also addresses the digital literacy-driven disparity. I began to see a different side: the risk of repeating dominant structures. It is true that crowdsourcing is more open than traditional top-down methods. It gives a space for minority voices. But in reality, most platforms still favor the thoughts of the majority. When a system uses voting or comments to decide what is "best," the most popular opinions appear on the first screen, based on the innate algorithms. People then naturally assume that these top-ranked posts are the "right" ones. I am sure I am not the only one who feels tired of thi...

When I was a master’s student, I had clear goals, such as publishing papers and getting into a PhD program. I could see my progress quickly, and I was already motivated, so I didn't need any other rewards. However, as a PhD student, I have too many things to do at once. Without motivation, I keep procrastinating and being lazy, thinking, “I can do it tomorrow.” So I tried designing a digital badge application for lazy grad students, based on the functional badge taxonomy (Horstman et al., 2020)! It might look like a simple checklist, but if I could build a digital badge app, it would look like this… There are some tags, and some of them are already set, such as research project, writing manuscripts, class study, self-directed learning, and course assignments. You can also make new tags. Design: You can note your weekly tasks on a calendar. The badges update every week, and you can exchange them for cute icons. You can see the anonymous icons of other university students on a world ...