The "Wisdom of crowds" is a common concept amongst web aficionados. It's the notion that a group working together, despite being spread across the web can produce something much more useful than an individual working alone. Amazon were one of the first companies to realise its potential in a big way by encouraging its customers to review the products it sells. The idea being that customer reviews carry a much greater authority than marketing blurb. There is a common misconception that Wikipedia also harnesses this power. However, recent research at Carnegie Mellon University reported on at ReadWriteWeb shows that there is a real danger that intensive activity by relatively small number of customers can seriously skew customer ratings. Similarly, 1% of Wikipedia members are responsible for over 50% of the edits. So the whole idea of the "Wisdom of Crowds" may well be overrated and called into question. Nevertheless, when working at a more prosaic level it is still a very useful concept with realworld, practical applications as the development of Ideas to Inspire amply demonstrates.
Using the collaborative power of Google Docs, Tom Barrett (a teacher from Nottingham) and Anthony Evans (the ICT advisor for the London Borough of Redbridge) among others have been creating a whole series of presentations containing useful ideas, tips and inspiration. Each one is thrown open to teachers to add their own ideas and is a genuinely collaborative effort (I've added a few ideas of my own). As an example, here is one on ideas for using search engines in the classroom:
Anthony has also just started work on one about digital images and he would be very pleased to give you edit rights to the presentation (just drop him a line) The complete collection of these presentations can be found at Ideas to Inspire, a truly inspiring example of the wisdom of crowds in action.
