Classroom collaboration marketplace

While I am uncomfortable with the whole “classroom as
marketplace” metaphor, since it’s pretty much gamifying without the
fun, I am nonetheless interested in this strategy for encouraging
students to collaborate by having them attach a value to the
artifacts they present to the class for sharing..

20130709-122040.jpgWe shop for everything from
apps to ideas. We have assembled digital toolkits for our
classrooms, filled with content, assessments, and applications from
a multitude of providers. Others of us are the creators who add
lesson plans, content, assessments, and even apps to the cloud
where we share or sell them to others. That’s the world we work in,
that’s the future world, and that’s a world that we can set up for
our students right in our own classrooms, too. A marketplace gets
artifacts . . . “things” . . . into the hands of people who need
them and rewards the people who create them. The Classroom
Marketplace works the same way, and it prepares students to reap
the benefits of real-world marketplaces. The internet allows people
to profit from anything they’re good at. The modern entrepreneur
has figured that out. The internet has produced many wealthy teens,
and that’s an opportunity that must be democratized. When students
work on digital projects (like a PowerPoint, wiki, or Glogster),
they create digital artifacts that they put into the project. These
artifacts could be images, video clips, audio clips, text content,
and so on. The Classroom Marketplace lets them “sell” some of those
artifacts to other students who are working on the same project.