eLearning & Deliberative Moments

The 2008 Horizon Report (New Media Consortium/Educause Learning Initiative) lists collective intelligence amongst its list of emerging trends in ICT-mediated learning. The report has trouble defining it, first as the kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people and then the knowledge embedded within societies or large groups of individuals. My reading is that it's a system of collected data from a lot of individual activity such that from its combination an inate knowledge emerges.

But there is more too it, as I'm reluctant to call the federal election of a Prime Minister evidence of collective intelligence! As James Surowiecki describes in Wisdom of Crowds, it's more than just a statistical aggregation or competition. Rather, it is that whole new patterns and conceptions come through that were previously unimaginable by individuals. Also, the individual activity is ongoing and contributes to the macro outcomes in a complex way over time.

Some believe that intelligence should be attributed to the collective as a whole. For example, how can termites just know how to construct a mound? And how does traffic (especially in some cities) manage to just flow? The key here is that intersubjective communication creates new protocols, such as indexicality (eg. use of pronouns that presume mutual understanding). This takes us to Gerry Stahl's group cognition, which I accept as an analytical approach rather an epistemological commitment.

I have read so many blog comments, especially to op-eds, from people who equate any group activity with coercion. I wonder if they carry a deep-seated fear that a room of people can literally "think alike" dangerously and irrationally, that groupthink doesn't just describe a situation of compelled commitments, but even a paranormal phenomenon. Group activity threatens to over-write individual preferences. Perhaps they have been left scarred on the outer too many times.

I'd be careful not to put Stephen Downes in that category, but he certainly sees the political imbalances of society playing out in groups, especially those that are institutionally established (eg. schools, universities and corporations). In a learning context, a group is the medium which privileges conformity over disruptive creativity. This leads him to promote broader, networked alliances for lifewide learning and has given strong support to the connectivist approach of George Siemens.

I had started writing this blog entry before George wrote this entry into his wiki. I'm chuffed that he starts with the same realisation that we mix up vernacular with technical uses of the terms collective and connective. I think we have to be careful with scale--we don't think we should compare small groups with large networks. I believe that George is correct to begin speaking of large-scale democratic situations. I'd like to take it a step further.

If you believe that the primacy and rights of the individual should underlie our ethics and organisation of state, then discourse (and thus learning) through our dynamic network of connections is preferable. On the other hand, if you believe that we are our communities and culture, then you could not be compelled to reject the collective approach at any scale.

To my mind, the connective view of distributed knowledge through networks of individuals can work for everyone. It's not an either-or proposition.

Posted by rlubensky on 24 February 2008 at 12:58 PM | Permalink