“The school as the crowd: Adventures in crowdsourcing with schools” by Ally Davies is a study on the Tag London website, a project which asked students to catalogue art pieces. The creators of Tag London worked with primary and secondary school teachers to ensure the project benefitted students as a supplement to their history education, while the museum used the student-generated data to better the searchability of the Museum of London website.
I wondered to myself about the ethics of crowdsourcing while reading this piece. While it seemed that students were engaged by the website, thus learning about art and artifacts from different time periods, teachers explained that the project needed to be more interactive and customizable to their curriculum to be truly beneficial. Explaining that this would require costly adjustments to the site, the teachers and museum were unable to reach a compromise and the project was abandoned.
There are four issues that critics of crowdsourcing argue. First, that businesses should support their communities by employing locally, which was the case in this particular project. Second, that people should be paid for their contributions. It can be said that the English grade schoolers were getting paid through education.
However, critics also say that it is exploitative to pay people in very low amounts. Therefore if their contributions were to be inconsequential to their grades (which was often the case in this project as the site was not customizable to different curriculums) the simple act of becoming more educated about the world was not incentive enough, and was therefore exploiting the students. For the museum, the cost of redesigning the website that students used outweighed the price of the work that the students were doing.
Finally, critics also say that professionals should not do unpaid work. The study by Davies emphasized that both parties needed to achieve mutual benefit from participating in the Tag London project, schools needed “an engaging learning experience, and the museum (reaching large numbers and improving collections data) “ Though the students were the ones doing the nitty gritty work (and they were not professionals) there is a third party at play in this particular case. Teachers logged many hours out of the classroom testing the museum software and designing appropriate lesson plans. Some declined to use the software because they did not feel like they had enough of a handle on the site to make it useful. These professionals were not getting paid for their work and input on the site, when they provided insight on how the first time user would interact, or by lending their classroom time to Tag London.
Overall, this project can be considered unethical because it valued the student input over the teachers. Though the students were the ones directly working and benefitting, the teachers who facilitated the entire project would have received the same, or greater benefit through sticking to their own lesson plans and curriculum.