A research paper I am writing at the moment (on plagiarism detection and copyright law) inspired me to answer this question.

Mechanical Turk could be used to fight plagiarism. Rather than have teachers attempt to research every sentence that might be copied and pasted, Turks could do it. Services exist at the moment to fight plagiarism but they may turn out to be more expensive than using Turk and have 2 relevant limitations. First, computers and not humans do the screening and humans are arguably better, and second is that none of the online plagiarism detection tools check printed materials. Turks that are experts in their fields, or even other teachers, might recognize a paragraph from a textbook that they use.
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Art projects are pretty cool. Like the one project where an artist asked many people to try different types of sheep. The coolest one I've seen is the project called "Ten Thousand Cents" where people were paid to draw a very small section of a 100 dollar bill and then they took all of the animations and stitched them together to have one simultaneous animation of all small sections drawn at once.
Source(s):
http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html

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