Week 4 - Crowdsourcing Knowledge and the Babytok Project

 This week my boss told me about a fascinating project she heard about at a recent Early Learning Coalition Provider Webinar. The project is being is being conducted by Mollie Romano and Edie Kiratzis at the Communication and Early Childhood Research and Practice Center here at FSU. It's called the Babytok Project, and Romano and Kiratzis describe it as "a new approach to helping infant‐toddler teachers learn more about early infant communication using social media." When my boss told me about this project, I immediately thought how cool the project sounds. She's aware I'm taking a Web2.0 course this semester, so she knew this would be a perfect project to explore.

This is a brand new project, and the participants work in infant-toddler classrooms and have mobile devices with TikTok installed. Over 8 weeks, participants watch daily one-minute videos about infant-toddler communication with which they are encouraged to engage by liking and commenting.

This is a wonderful instance of social media and learning, a prime example of the concepts we are learning in this class. One of the topics this week, crowdsourcing, really jumps out to me when thinking about the Babytok Project. By watching the videos, liking, commenting, and sharing, the participants will create a community of learning and professional development and it will only cost them about a minute or so of their busy day. This community has the opportunity to create a "folksonomy," which in our readings Petrucco describes as a folk taxonomy, a classification system created by the users in the field instead of an authority or institution (2011). Early childhood educators and child care professionals will be able to watch the same videos and communicate with each other, participating in a similar context and using words and labels (in this case related to infant and toddler communication) that will be meaningful to them. Participants will crowdsource the knowledge by each person contributing their experience, their knowledge, and their narratives. By the end of the project, hopefully the repertoire of knowledge related to infant-toddler communication will be expanded by a little bit.

Update: Mollie and I had a great correspondence over the weekend, she filled me in on some of the finer points of the project. The project team sends weekly videos to participants that focus on two main topics: 1) sharing content about very early communication development and strategies, and 2) building teacher self efficacy by reminding them about their role and importance.

As of now, videos are one-way only. The project team sends out videos, but participants can't send videos back or share videos with each other. The only way Mollie and Edie can collect data is to see when participants like and comment on the videos. However, they did ask participants about their social media use in the beginning interviews, and will gauge their interest in further sharing and following when they collect feedback and ideas for next steps in the closing interviews.

Learning about this project and chatting with Mollie was a great experience and allowed me to see a tangible blend of social media, learning, and professional development. I'm excited to see how the project turns out!