Michael Wesch wrote up a quick post describing how he crowdsourced the reading list for his course - students found articles, reviewed a few each, and shared the resulting reviews. In the end, students had quality summaries available for 94 articles, while only having to read and summarize a handful themselves. Distribution of workload, and the power of openness.
All summaries were due 36 hours before the next class period, leaving those final 36 hours for all students to read all the summaries posted by their fellow team-members.
By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles. This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation. I think all of us were literally on the edge of our seats, finding connections and debates across the literature at a level I have *never* experienced in an undergraduate setting. I count it as a huge success, and I would highly recommend it to any other faculty out there looking to spark an engaging conversation with your students.
I'm planning on writing a tip sheet for faculty members to follow this pattern using tools and resources that are available to them on campus. For instance, a WordPress blog with a category for "Article Reviews", possibly using something like Flutter to create the structured article review fields etc... Could even add star ratings to help prioritize items.