June 17, 2004
Antwork: Convergence, Collaboration
Rob Wall writes:
'I refer to it as antwork because it has the characteristic of how ant colonies arise out of the actions of individual ants. Individual ants carry out their actions as individuals, and each individual ant does a miniscule amount of work. But when there are several thousand or tens of thousands (like in my basement), the aggregate effect can be staggering. Like ants, each of the students did just a little bit of work gathering or entering information. Many students (and other teachers involved with the project) were surprised how quickly the sites came together once they started entering information.'
and
'My students' work is, I believe, a prime example of convergence in action. The work was decentralized because they were each working as autonomous agents (well - semi-autonomous really since I did make this a requirement for the class). They developed interview questions, found people to interview, took picures and did all the knowledge-gathering work. I set very few restrictions on the interview (and was rewarded with a couple of interviews that I wouldn't have thought of including, but turned out to be dynamite). As much as possible, however, I gave them the responsibility to go out into the world and gather the resource we needed (interviews with farmers, in our case).'