This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education had an article that indicated that the fees that Amazon would be collecting for the use of Mechanical Turk would be going up.  Many (some) of you might be aware of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website.  The website is designed as an online option for paid piecework.

Over the past several years, social science researchers have been using Mechanical Turk as a mechanism to collect large amounts of data in a very short amount of time (hours) vs. traditional means of collecting data (mail surveys, emailed surveys like links to SurveyMonkey, phone interviews, face-to-face interviews etc.) which range from a few days to months of data collection.  While it’s become the norm for researchers, I have been considering for a couple of years it’s viability for micro-volunteering.

With the change in fees being imminent, I’m thinking if I’m going to try this out, I had better get in gear!  :)

For those of you that may have used Mechanical Turk or are considering it’s use, have you considered the viability of using it for micro-volunteering within Extension?  Would you be interested in teaming up for a little social experiment in micro-volunteering?  :)