You can’t hunt mastodons while your fighting with other groups and you probably can’t catch one by yourself either. Collaboration is the key to finding food, health, wealth, and your way in society. Collaboration, also referred to as collectivism, isn’t a new concept; it’s something we humans have been doing throughout all our years. Is it innate as Rheingold suggests? Well, I can’t answer that. It seems that many in the world get by with little to no human interaction but maybe I’m wrong. And I don’t know if they are happy or not, so please don’t ask me. The only thing I do know is that they would have more if they were willing to collaborate.
That “more” can be defined as pretty much anything you want. More information. More money. More education. More travel. More food. More friends. More technology. More freedom. More A’s in your Quantitative Reasoning course (shout out to my Cohort Crew!)…OK, maybe that last one is just about me but I think you get the point.
Technology makes getting groups together, to work toward common goals, easier than it has ever been.
I’m not exactly reaching out to the masses with this blog but it does allow me to communicate ideas and even ask for input from my peers. Wikipedia is another example of the power behind collective action… an online encyclopedia with a level of accuracy that is comparable to the print versions we always thought to be The Truth but with entries and revisions that are real-time (there’s even a wiki page for that!).
How do constructivist principles come into play? That’s easy. Technology allows people to develop their own background knowledge and to create their own experience. Collaboration tools allow learners to reach out to one another, to share and gather more information through a variety of dialogue styles, and also provide a platform for self-reflection.
Want a tangible example? Chile mine rescue spurred unprecedented global coordination
4 comments:
Dolly,
I love the link to Khan Academy! This is a great site which shows the true nature of "sharing" learning in a Creative Commons kind of way.
After reading your post, I can see how I reacted so strongly to Rheingold's notion that human innate instinct is to interact and work as a group. My entire post is centered on refuting this idea!
I like how you've not quite agreed with his postulate, yet, offered substantiation for it. I'm still not entirely convinced that one acquires more money through collaboration, or more freedom, or any of these, to be truthful.
Collaboration CAN produce these results, but isn't a direct cause of the best of everything. It only takes one bad experience of collaboration gone sour for one to realize that it doesn't always work successfully.
The example of the Chilean mine tragedy is a wonderful example of everyone doing just the right thing in syncopation, and supporting the efforts of each team, all focused on a common goal, to get the miners out safely. And, yet, sadly,there are recent examples when teams working together toward a common goal has also only ended in tragedy, such as the mining tragedy in West Virginia in April 2010. Twenty-nine miners worked together, and died together in the mine.
Lori,
When I first began writing the post, I ripped into Rheingold's notion of collaboration being innate but then I sat back and gave my own experiences a good hard look. In all of the experiences in which I have chosen to collaborate with others and have been in a position in which to say who I am willing to collaborate with and on what terms I have found great success. In the experiences in which I was joined with others and expected to collaborate, I have to say only half of them were truly successful.
But I do stand by my comments of acquiring more through collaboration. I've always been into politics, social movements, and activism and I can tell you there is power in numbers; the suffragists, civil rights movements, labor unions, and even the Tea Party are examples of the power found through collaboration and collective bargaining.
Dolly,
Great post. I must agree that we learn more by collaborating. I don't know if it is a desire we are born with or something we learn. However I do beleive that when we collaborate all stand to gain from the experience.
Trissia,
It's that whole nature vs. nurture argument, isn't it?!?!
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