Response to Davidson close readings

Thank you all for your insightful posts and contributions to today’s class discussion. I have a few comments to help guide you as you get started on your second reading and your first essay assignment. A number of you have done a good job of pointing to specific moments in the passage, in particular to note its word choice. Darren and Gabrielle’s posts are both good examples—I like Gabrielle’s emphasis that the use of “we” includes readers in this vision of crowdsourcing. I would also encourage you, however, to attend to other aspects of form: in particular, other classes noted that the parallelism in some of the sentences seems to compare credentialism and crowdsourcing, but it doesn’t do so in the same terms. The sentence structure changes midway. On the whole, though, you did a good job of attending to elements of the binary that Davidson sets up here. I particularly like the way that Darren discusses how the account of crowdsourcing is simplified. Davidson does seem to devote more attention to critiquing “hierarchical” education than to explaining why her crowdsourcing solution is an effective one.

I look forward to seeing the connections you make between this reading and Johnson’s. As always, let me know if you have additional questions.