It's important to realize that intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual brains. It also arises with groups of individuals. Collective intelligence can be defined as groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By that definition, of course, collective intelligence has been around for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies: those are all examples of groups of people working together in ways that at least sometimes seem intelligent.

The rise of the Internet has led to the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence, including Wikipedia, Linux, Googl.e, eBay, and many others.   Think of Google, for instance, where millions of people all over the world create web pages, and link those web pages to each other. Then all that knowledge is harvested by the Google technology so that when you type a question in the Google search bar the answers you get often seem amazingly intelligent, at least by some definition of the word "intelligence."

Wikipedia is the one where thousands of people all over the world have collectively created a very large and amazingly high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control. And by the way, without even being paid

Watch this video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7-CEDyoibQ

The community of people that developed the Linux open source operating system embodies what we call the "crowd" gene, because anyone who wants to contribute new modules for the Linux operating system. But that community also embodies what we call the "hierarchy" gene, because Linus Torvalds and a few of his friends and lieutenants decide—essentially hierarchically—which of the modules that people send in will actually be included in the new versions of the system. So that's the genomes of collective intelligence project.

Inspired by systems like Wikipedia and Linux, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Collective Intelligence has developed Climate CoLab, crowdsourcing platform where people work with experts and each other to create, analyze, and select detailed proposals for what to do about climate change. 

The research suggests that just as some individuals are smarter than others, some groups are smarter than others, across a range of tests and tasks. In other words, there is a "c factor" for collective intelligence. Teams that are successful at solving visual puzzles also tend to be good at brainstorming and beating computers in video games.

In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, it is found that converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Collective intelligence is an emerging field that already has a great impact in many areas and will have implications in educational, not only from the side of new methodologies but also as a change in the educational paradigm, currently centered on the student and not in the collectivity. Gregg (2009) referenced in Pérez_Gallardo (2013) states “There are many works that address the concept of collective intelligence, and they can be observed in many domains such as education”. Tsai et al., (2011) maintains that collective intelligence “can be used for both instructors and students to create education materials that can have great value. The collective intelligence of instructors, teaching assistants, and students can be used for creating and publishing subject area knowledge, instruction materials, instruction methods and tools, educational standards and curricula, assessment materials, and student performance assessment and for the evaluation of education materials.” The works analyzed show that collective intelligence can strengthen collaboration and competition while enriching interaction between individuals to acquire and share knowledge. In areas such as project based learning collective intelligence techniques may facilitate decision-making.

References

• Anita Woolley, Thomas W. Malone, and Christopher F. Chabris, Why Some Teams are Smarter than Others, , New York Times, January 2015. 
• David Engel, Anita Williams Woolley, Lisa X. Jing, Christopher F. Chabris, and Thomas W. Malone, Reading the mind in the eyes or reading between the lines? Theory of Mind predicts effective collaboration equally well online and face-to-face, PLOS One, December 2014
• Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher, and Laur Fisher, How Millions of People Can Help Solve Climate Change, Nova Next, January 2014.
• Abraham Bernstein, Mark Klein, and Thomas W. Malone, Programming the Global Brain,Communications of the ACM, May 2012.
• http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/the-secret-to-smart-groups-isnt-smart-people/384625/
• Collective intelligence in education: a content analysis of publications in selected journals from 2010 to 2015, F. Grimon, J.M. Monguet, J. Meza, 7th International Conference on Education and New Learning TechnologiesBarcelona, Spain. 6-8 July, 2015.

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