Practices of crowdsourcing in relation to big data analysis and education methods

Abstract

The subject of our paper is crowdsourcing and its use in big data analysis and education. Crowdsourcing is the latest revolution brought about by the digital technologies of computing and communication. Since 2006, it has been a popular process of obtaining services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially from an online community, using ICT. Firstly we introduce crowdsourcing in the context of the information society, ubiquitous computing, and Web 2.0. We shall then look at the paradigm shift in methodology caused by the advent of crowdsourcing and big data. This brings us to the focus of our paper, where we can define and categorize crowdsourcing according to several aspects, and introduce the theory of collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, in order to present its use in big data analysis and education. In the fourth part, we give examples of citizen science crowdsourcing related to education. Finally, we raise some important issues and draw conclusions.