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Guardian Weekly
January 10, 2012


Creative Use of Crowdsourcing
by Max de Lotbinièr

English language learners in Japan are getting the benefit of feedback on their written work from over 6,000 internet users.

A class project, co-lead by James York with 18 to 20-year-olds at Tsukuba and Tokyo Denki universities, uses the internet news site reddit.com as a platform to publish the students' digital comic strips.

Students were first introduced to ragefaces.com, a growing repository of weird and witty cartoon faces, sparking group discussions about the emotions they represent.

York says his digital native students had no difficulty creating and uploading short comic strips mixing images, text and jokes, all in English. As he explains in his blog, he needed to resolve some technical issues to allow group access to sites designed for individual use. http://yorksensei.posterous.com/creating-rage-comics-with-efl-students

The real value of the project came when the comic strips were published on a specially created reddit.com EFL comics page, eliciting comments and feedback from native-speaker readers.

"Students get a rare chance to express themselves creatively in English and it is a great for intercultural communication," said York.

"For teachers the project can be seen as crowd-sourcing native English-speakers to voluntarily correct students' mistakes, praise them and communicate with them."
How to create rage comics
James York's blog