From Health 2050: The Realization of Personalized Medicine through Crowdsourcing, the Quantified Self, and the Participatory Biocitizen, Journal or Personalised Medicine, 12 September 2012
Some of the limitations (specifically for health, but I’m sure you could draw parallels with ed)…
The responsibility becomes that of the individual, including associated costs.
Crowd sourcing is fine to find solutions to certain issues, but for some things, a more rigorous, approach requiring expert knowledge is required.
3.4.5. Participatory Health Pioneers Are Defining the Preventive Medicine Mindset
While criticism has been levied against quantified self-experimentation and crowdsourced healthstudy participation as being the special-interest activities of a small minority of those particularly, andpotentially obsessively, interested in health tracking and improvement, it can be argued that thesepioneers are critical in facilitating the widespread realization of preventive medicine. It is the‘Wikipedia-ization of health’ as a small number of contributors join to create a public good ofextensive and universal value. In technological and social movements, early adopters not only pave theway at the practical level, innovating tools and experimental processes so that they can be madecost-efficient and codified into effective means for attaining results, but also at the qualitative level.Early adopters help to make new ideas and techniques known as initially being strange andpreposterous, but then more commonplace as a sensibility and maturity develops, and valuepropositions become defined to different audiences. Self-awareness, self-tracking, monitoring,experimenting, and action-taking are critical components in the preventive medicine movement, andearly adopters, health hackers, and gene geeks are expected to innovate at the radical edge as the firststep towards mainstream adoption. The full path to the realization of the personalized preventivemedicine of the future is just starting to be defined, and the way forward will likely be elucidated byinnovators, both institutional and individual, and then expanded as other groups see and implement thevalue for themselves.
There are a number of reasons that Health 2050: Preventive Medicine might not happen whichrange from institutional change to human behavioral psychology. Some of the most important can begrouped into five categories: technical feasibility, priority, human nature, timing, and criticisms ofparticipatory preventive health models. First and foremost is technical feasibility in the sense thathealth research generally, whether institutional or participatory efforts, has not been effective atfinding solutions to the most complex health challenges (a recent high-profile example is cancerimmunotherapy).
One answer (taking the idea of narcissism literally)
And from this website – some words of warning:
On occasion, self-trackers have been called obsessive, narcissistic or self-absorbed. Be careful you’re not teetering into being overly preoccupied with yourself! Moreover, if data collection turns obsessive and stops you living a fulfilled life, you’ll need to reassess its worth to you. If the data starts driving what you do each day, be sure to take care to stop this encroachment.