Interesting how a current mode of thinking can permeate every moment, every random action, completely affecting one’s view. Currently absorbed by the topic of online curriculum development and the collaborative communities forming around this effort (particularly the way in which learning objects can be found, cataloged, sorted and indexed), I see simple mention of a video presentation about some random technology, and immediately see significance for my current obsession.

Could symmetric and asymmetric verification games be used to index online educational content?

Check out the episode of Google TechTalks titled “Human Computation: Games With A Purpose” (July 26, 2006; approx. 50 min, 35 min presentation plus Q&A). Featuring Luis von Ahn (site) – assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University; Microsoft Research Fellowship recipient.

“Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. [von Ahn advocates] a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game — many people play over 40 hours a week — and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.

“Von Ahn describes other examples of ‘games with a purpose’: Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. Von Ahn also explains a general approach for constructing games with a purpose.”

I blogGoogled “games with purpose” and found 74 links. This will make 75, I reckon. Here’s an excerpt from Tim O’Reilly’s take on this video:

“As the symbiosis between humans and computers becomes deeper, and at a larger scale, we’re going to see problems that were formerly construed as ‘hard AI’ suddenly broken, not because computers themselves have become intelligent, but because humans and computers have gotten better at working together.“

Excellent summary, and a thought-provoking prognosis. O’Reilly’s article then led me to Creating Passionate Users , which may also hold some clues for online curriculum development communities, such as the Curriki project.

The segments on PeekaBoom and Verbosity showed how the ESP game data has been extended. Noteworthy is that the project is “funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF)”.

Fascinating.

Note to Luis von Ahn: Where is the data now? Has it been made public?