Part+One+-+Collaboration+as+a+21st+Century+Skill

Return to Collaborative Lecture

Post your entries for Part One below:
"cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a central role in biology, from the level of the cell to the level of the ecology...rational self interest is not always the dominating factor." EA

"instead of there being an innate sense of fairness, somehow how the basis for our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions, whether we know that or not" EA

"biology is way in which only the fiercest survive businesses and nations succeed only by defeating, destroying and dominating competition...but we can see the very beginnings of a new story starting to emerge...in which cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role" EA

I appreciate this new story/narrative and I feel grateful for playing a small role in its unfolding! Not sure I would have made a good cave man? (EK)

"Communication has been evolving for a long, long time." LV  @LV Do you notice how communication and collaboration are closely connected here. Similarly connectivity comes into play. DN Hopefully the way we communicate will continue to evolve alongside our technological achievements. (EK) and it has helped "solve collective action problems." I also love how Howard Rheingold discusses what every desktop computer is now. IY Desktops as supercomputers is parallel to people as encyclopedia writers I think...EH

In regards to the second game described (a variation of the prisoner's game), "altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together." IY

With Web 3.0 what will be the "altruistic punishment"? Will the net in the future actually glue our society together on a spiritual plane, or cause us to physically isolate more? It isn't like we all need to work together like hunters gathering food for survival of the masses...LV

Good questions. For me, web 3.0 will unite us together and the mammoth we were collectively hunting in the past is a metaphor for conquering modern day problems like AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. (EK)

I believe Web 3.0 has the capacity to produce either. However, if carried out in the right way, it will unite us together (RR)

"And then another communication technology enabled new media: the printing press came along, and **within decades** **millions of people became literate** and from literate populations new forms of collective action emerged in the spheres of knowledge, religion and politics." EH This is just what we are living through now. The internet is created and with it, a new form of literacy, and within decades new forms of collective action and knowledge emerge. EH

The new knowledge we acquire is one that we help produce collectively.LV Not coincidentally, I think explaining this is like explaining the difference being students doing a project to show what they learned and project-based learning. EH

How do we make our classrooms the environments in which students collaborate to learn material effectively so that they have the knowledge to produce these collective works? YW Good Question. I think that technology is evolving in a way that is working to answer this question. They could use collaborative online forums like this one to share their ideas, and teach one another. EL I see this happening with technology as well. What I also saw was that students didn't always take ownership and found it difficult to come up with something of their own. There were many answers that agreed with other answers. This may be an issue with framing, and getting students used to the concept of the online forums. YW @YW - my question is: are these less involved students learning from observing the activity of those who are more involved? Lave and Wenger (2009) suggest that there is such a thing as Legitimate Periferral Participation. DN

After students use a forum like this to share information, they could use a more creative application to transform their conversations into something new. For instance, if 8th grade Confirmation/Hebrew High School students are having a discussion about what the meaning of a particular Torah portion is, they could then transform what they "create with words" and transform it using a collaborative video application which could than be shared with the class back on a forum such as this. (JG) @JG Great idea, sometimes you need to take the interaction a step or two further. DN

In addition, I think students will only learn the concepts if they have the opportunity to practice, fail, learn from their mistakes, and try again. (EK)

The problem I see with online forums, and have definitely seen this in the other online class I am currently taking, is that once a student has seen the answer another student has gave, they sometimes feel like (even if they could have come up with that idea on their own) they cannot address that same idea or give that similar opinion. I think collaboration and discussion in forums would work better if students posted their answers to the initial question and until a certain point (where students had to have posted their initial post by) the students cannot see eachothers post. Then, the posts would open up and be visible, and discussion could happen. In my online class, we have to answer the initial question/questions by Friday night, and the forum closes sunday night. In what I am talking about, we would only be able to see our own post until Friday night, at which point the other posts would become visible. (AB) (snaps - signifying agreement at JCHS) I have had the same issue you describe above! I haven't really tried the method you describe and am very interested in it. The class you are taking makes things visible after a certain point? HD No, Its just how I wish it worked. I'm sure theres some way for it to be set up like that. AB

@AB & HD - perhaps in time, when students become more comfortable expressing themselves they will venture out onto their own paths. Meanwhile, the teacher might require a unique thread or topic for each student or rotate the job of "discussion leader" among the students. DN

===I still see the evidence that students remain fiercely competitive with one another. The competition to get into colleges, brings out this fierce competition among students. How can we facilitate a change towards more collaboration? YW ===

===How can we use the open source concept in education? Sharing information may be in the best interest of our students. Traditionally, we have been taught that some students will do little to no work if someone else will make the contributions. YW === @YW I believe that in part this is generated by an atmosphere that encourages competition and does not tolerate failure. DN

I think the open source concept of education you are emphasizing here Yvonne can work only when we hold students accountable for their work. (EK)

<span style="color: #6b1f6b; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">"At some point, **they banded together** to hunt bigger game." EL <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Perhaps, at some point, students will band together to tackle the more challenging assignments. This could be a way to promote collaborative learning. Instead of having each student choose a person on whom to write a term paper, for example, let them collaborate in small groups to get the project done. Perhaps this could lead to more complete projects with different presentation modes (a paper, a visual representation, a poem or song, and a video, for example). YW

<span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: 'Arial Black','sans-serif';">“Descartes promoted a new way of thinking…..what forms of suffering can be limited if we know more about cooperation?” (EK)

<span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: 'Arial Black','sans-serif'; font-size: 15px;">“What I’m not saying is that cooperation will help us be better people.” (EK)

<span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"In fact, if you look back human communication media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for a long time." (JG)

<span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"Every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community, or a marketplace" (AB)

//"Not created by the printing press but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy."//

//"Every computer is a printing press"//

He spoke about mobile technology for political organizing and how it changes the ability for people to engage in the democratic process on a grass roots level. The impact of this in developing nations and emerging democracies is unimaginable. I saw this reality change in Africa during the three years I lived in Togo (2004-06) as a Peace Corps volunteer and then working in Kenya until 2008.

In Togo, there was a fixed election where the son of the recently deceased President (of 30 years) won in a huge landslide. My own village that had fewer than 10,000 people cast over 100,000 votes. Since the cell phone company was a government monopoly the early violence after the elections dissipated because the opposition could not organize over distances.

In 2007 when Kenya has a disputed election the opposite happened. The two major cell phone companies in Kenya where not controlled by the government and people where sending photos to the BBC while the ballot fixing was happening in real time. The short-term results were violence but in the long term Kenya got a stronger democracy. Last year everything went off reasonably well, but in Togo the son is still in power over ten years later. (SB)

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">I was most stuck by what I think I understood that he sees the next wave after industrialization, capitalism and socialism as some "ism" based out of collaboration. This is a new concept for me and very interesting as a political movement of some sort. I think the idea makes a lot of sense and further motivates me to use more collaborative techniques in my classes! HD

“And very, very quickly we’re going to see a significant portion if not the majority of the human race walking around, holding, carrying, or wearing supercomputers linked at speeds greater than what we consider to be Broadband today.” RR

DN response to part I: Whatever you may say (see above) about the Forum, I think that it did prepare you for this experiment. I am impressed with the lively exchange about the anthropological/sociological evolution of collaboration. The result of your efforts is definitely non-linear. This may bother some of you who have been trained to expect a virtual train of facts. Still, as I read through your responses, there were many critical quotes quoted, important questions asked, and interesting ideas offered. In the sum of the parts, I believe that you were able to analyze Rheingold's ideas reasonably well. No lecture can capture all of the information that one needs to know. The idea is to open the doors to further consideration and analysis.