New technologies and functionality are moving from fringe to mainstream faster than ever. One of the latest fringe-to-mainstream transformations, and the inspiration for this post, is a November 3rd report from Wired that Gannett has discovered “crowdsourcing” and has rechristened its newsrooms information centers, instead of organizing them into separate metro, state or sports departments. The Wired story continues here…, there’s more coverage on the PaidContent blog here…. There’s still more on the Crowdsourcing.com blog here… as well as another Wired article about crowdsourcing in virtual worlds here….

All of which starts me wondering if crowdsourcing could be applied to educational content and technology. Consider: if the teachers and students in a learning community (classroom, school or district) could contribute, recommend and rank learning materials for clarity, quality and value, might the result be greater relevancy between learning materials and students needs, and improved learning outcomes?