William Cope
Adam P Rusch
Jason Berg
Duane Searsmith.png "Rita van Haren")
Rita van Haren
Eric Patnoudes
Maura Rodgers Brand
Jason Williams
Melanie Lamus
Heather A Ochmane-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
Collective Intelligence
When I decided to write about collective intelligence the first thing that came to mind wasn’t the internet or social media, but ants. Yes, ants. An individual ant is not a very smart creature; However, they are capable of amazing feats when working as a collective. William Morton Wheeler observed this in 1911 and brought forth the idea of the ant colony as an organism unto itself called a super organism.[1] In the video below you’ll see army ants that are virtually blind work together to create and repair a bridge across a widening gap:
Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from collaboration, collective efforts, and competition.[2] We benefit from collective intelligence nearly every day thanks to the internet. When you make a purchase online or look at a restaurant to visit we rely on the collective intelligence of others in the form or reviews.
Source: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/11/23/1542949202000/How-one-Chinese-company-generates-reviews-on-Amazon/
In terms of education, collective intelligence is still an emerging field[3]. In traditional didactic pedagogies, the focus has been on the individual learner, not the group as a whole. In the book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams share four principles that must exist for collective intelligence to work[4]:
- Openness: The ability to bring forth ideas and intellectual property to the group.
- Peering: The ability to modify and develop existing systems.
- Sharing: The joint use of resources and spaces.
- Acting Globally: The removal of geographical boundaries.
These four principles are on display in front of our very eyes as we participate in this course together. We are all creating our own educational artifacts in an open environment, using peer feedback to modify and develop our ideas, and sharing a space to do so online with no geographical boundaries.
Collective intelligence in education is helping us break free from the test-heavy practices of the traditional classroom and create a more immersive and social educational experience. Working together we can bridge educational gaps that would seem impossible to cross on our own.
[1] "The ant‐colony as an organism - Wiley Online Library." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmor.1050220206. Accessed 30 Dec. 2019.
[2] "Collective intelligence - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence. Accessed 30 Dec. 2019.
[3] "Collective Intelligence Education, Enhancing ... - IEEE Xplore." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8372324. Accessed 30 Dec. 2019.
[4] "Collective Intelligence Education, Enhancing ... - IEEE Xplore." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8372324. Accessed 30 Dec. 2019.
This is really interesting. Thanks for writing about some great examples of collective intelligence at work. I'm curious about motivating people and paying for support. One thing that make Wikipedia work is that so many people are passionate about a topic and do enormous amounts of work for free. Wikipedia is supported by donations because it still has costs. In this course, we are all working together from around the world, and not only working for free but paying for the privilege. That money pays admins, instructors, web hosting, support and other costs. So one of the big questions I see is how to fund collective intelligence learning in other situations. A second question I have is how to prevent bias. In the case of Amazon reviews, this is generally done by blocking people who make repeated reviews from connected accounts, having regulations about the author or seller themselves posting reviews, or possibly other mechanism. However, those regulations will not prevent a bimodal distribution of reviews if only people who feel very strongly about something review it. In the case of Wikipedia, it is not possible to avoid bias by omission as happened when people wrote articles about male authors and not females. All of which is to say- I loved your summary, and it raised multiple other questions for me.