Colleges to Try 'Crowdsourcing' Their IT Help Desks

From the Chronicle: Colleges to Try 'Crowdsourcing' Their IT Help Desks.

Dewitt A. Latimer is among the most vocal proponents of the crowdsourced model of college technical support. He's chief technology officer at the University of Notre Dame, where the help desk is open only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. "But our students don't stop learning at 5 o'clock, and the faculty don't stop teaching at 5 o'clock," he told me recently. And, unlike Indiana, Notre Dame does not have an online database of advice, even for internal use.

 

A couple of years ago Mr. Latimer attended a college-technology conference and had one of those aha! moments. The keynote speaker was Barry Libert, a co-author of We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, who talked about how companies like Amazon.com were tapping into user recommendations to increase sales. "I was sitting there in the audience," Mr. Latimer said, "and I thought, This concept was very applicable to the higher-education space—it just needed somebody to recognize it and run with it."

I'm just about finished with the book Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. It offers a nice study of these kinds of social trends that  have recognized in the Web 2.0 realm for a while. Much of the discussion parallels points made by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.

What I wonder, now that IT desks are moving to crowdsourcing in universities, is when and how will the trends really take hold in other realms of education. Can you imagine a crowd-taught course?

The missing piece from most of these conceptions is thinking through the social dynamics. How exactly does wikipedia work as a social system is really the question to chew on. I hope that some of the work that will take place in the PIT Journal we are about to undertake at UNC will let us do some of that thinking.