What is collective intelligence?

There are several ways in which we can define traditional learning and teaching as a process designed towards individual intelligence. First of all, considering the input for the students: in a classroom with 20 or 30 students, we usually have only one source of input regarding information or knowledge, which usually comes in the form of a textbook or a professor, and that’s it. The student will learn from one input that will recite the information, he or she will memorize it and then it will spit it out into a quiz or test that will assess his or her ability to memorize the information handed. That’s what traditional learning is about: one input (the teacher) and one output (the test).

However, the results often found in this kind of learning are not the best, and usually many children are left behind. That’s how the idea of collaborative learning rises, which is the idea of knowledge built and assessed together. First of all, we have a notable change towards input, and very much thanks to the new technological possibilities: whereas information was once delivered through a professor or a textbook, now can be search for and found in multiple sources and in the form of multiple media. The student doesn’t have to settle for one input, when he can find multiple authors from many different times, countries, and many different ways of thinking. This information now can easily change media, so it’s not only words: now, hard and very technical information is much easily handed in the form or pictures, videos, or others. The student thanks to collaborative intelligence and new technologies will find multiple inputs.

Second of all, outputs change too: we no longer value memorization, but what we do with that information. We know that the information is not an invention of the student: we found it, he quotes it directly but he doesn’t have to memorize it. We know it will always be somewhere to be found, and that it doesn’t need to me remembered perfectly, but used correctly. And collaborative intelligence allow us to construct this knowledge together, to assess it from peer to peer, and overall, it’s a way for the best to help the average. In conclusion, collaborative intelligence, collaborative knowledge, stays longer and serves more, for we assess not the memory, but the work of these students.

Sources:

http://evonomics.com/how-to-creative-collective-intelligence-david-wilson-mulgan/

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-27/collective-intelligence-can-change-the-world