Seemed like a very small
Tech Ed conference this year--another victim of the economy, I suppose. Nevertheless, still a great incubator of tips, tricks and lots of stuff to keep one thinking for some months. Here are some highlights:
Epiphany #1:
Luis Von Ahn is the brain behind captchas, those funky boxes into which you type warped-out words to prove you're a human. He calculated all the time that people spend filling in those boxes (a surprisingly large amount of time!) and thought those human hours might be put to some good use. So he's figured out a
"re" -captcha program that combines the regular weird word with a word scanned in from a text that is being scanned and put onto the internet. Word by word, book by book, the program is putting millions of human hours into this project--free! It has made me think about unmined human potential and how to get students to do such work, but think of it as something else.
Another project along this line is a game that Von Ahn created that helps to create Alt Tags for images that aren't labeled on the internet. Interestingly enough, this simple game is pretty addictive, and it has accomplished amazing amounts of labeling--so much so that Google bought the program to complete its image labeling program. The Google version of the game is
Google Image Labeler (not such a great name, perhaps a new idea soon). Beware! It's pretty addictive.
