Scholarly Crowdsourcing: Twitter Does History

Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, my alma mater, tried an experiment yesterday that really made me think about how we can use social media in our classes.

Cohen posted on his blog that he was going to conduct an experiment using his blog and Twitter. He would post an artifact and using a Twitter hashtag, #digdil09, and his Twitter account, @dancohen. Cohen wanted to see if his Twitter and blog followers could determine what the object, shown above, was within one hour.

The post was put up at 3:00pm EST on Thursday and within the hour both @grresearch and @opencontent had found the answer.

The hashtag feed was a true example of what history is all about, investigating a problem through discussion. The "mystery", as Cohen put it, brought random people together virtually in order to solve the question through scholarly discourse using social media.

For me, this experiment again proved that Twitter isn't just for ego maniacs trying to be more popular than a news organization. Rather, this again proves that it can develop our personal learning network (PLN).

This could be an excellent opportunity for students to learn how to do research by not just simply using Google but through discussion and learning from others. With tools like Twitters and blogs, our students can now crowdsource and take advantage of the greater community of knowledge that is not only in the "blogosphere" but also in the "twittersphere".