Collective intelligence does not need to be invented by the instructor as much as the already existing real-world practices need to be harnessed and moderated by her/him for educational purposes in the digital classroom. Cope and Kalantzis have suggested that we adapt the reciprocal motivational structures of social media to the digital classroom in order to promote the exchange of ideas between students and to acknowledge the increasing importance of the social sources of intelligence (36). It is interesting that we look to social media for models in part because I think one of the virtues of collective intelligence training in the educational environment is to help combat the many pernicious examples of collective “intelligence” one can find in today’s social media landscape. This could in part be explained by the fact that just like collective intelligence, as an example of collaborative intelligence, is an affordance for learning, social media is only an affordance (and not a guarantee) for a healthy public sphere.

Working collaboratively exposes students to complexities of thought and to different perspectives. They must work as a team towards a common goal thus developing a sense of community and responsibility to each other and respect for differences. Students in the college classroom are, at least in principle, there to learn and absorb new ideas. Another precondition of fruitful collective intelligence in the digital classroom is the instructor-moderator and their authoritative knowledge. In other words, while the students are free to exchange ideas and sources openly and peer-review to develop their collective intelligence, not everything goes. The instructor indicates when an idea needs to be revised. These are the preconditions that make the digital classroom a wonderful place to test new ideas and create intelligence collectively.

The education scholar, Ronald Barnett suggests that genuine higher education prepares students to be comfortable with “supercomplexity” and deal with uncertainty, something undoubtedly relevant to our current moment. This is due to “the giving and taking of reasons, coming to an awareness that there are many perspectives on an issue, being able to see different sides of an argument, realising that one’s own views may be critiqued, and becoming aware that a new set of ideas may come along tomorrow that may upset the apple-cart”. In other words, having students participate in collective knowledge production is of utmost importance for learning how to cope with complexity in the world.

The public sphere entails the “collective will to get to the bottom of things” (Barnett 284) and presupposes an exchange between informed individuals debating new ideas in good faith. But what are the risks when participants make uninformed and uncritical attempts at collective intelligence via social media? Behold the echo chamber of misinformation and overly-simplified understandings of our increasingly complex world. This is not meant to suggest that everyone needs to necessarily attend college in order to make intelligent contributions to the public sphere, but that those without a college education are less likely to be able to discern good from bad information or deal comfortably with complexity.

I would suggest that this is based less on what the contributors to collective intelligence learned in college, but how they learned it. In the same article, Barnett uses the example of Brexit to illustrate his point. It was higher education rather than class, gender, or ethnicity which was the determining factor of the vote, and he therefore concludes that in lacking the ability or willingness to welcome the complexities of an interwoven global world, leavers were attracted to the reductionist narrative of a more simplified past (285). One could also argue that simplified narratives are better suited to circulate more efficiently through the logic of social media. I think this logic can be located in what Petar Jandrić, author of Learning in the Age of Digital Reason, refers to as “cognitive bio-informational capitalism” (276).

To conclude, collective intelligence is not just about what students have learned but in large part, how they’ve learned it. We must harness the power of collective intelligence in the classroom to help students cut through the noise and to avoid the need for facile and reductionist explanations of the world around them. The digital classroom should be the space to test ideas collectively and to adjust them, to appreciate or at least cope with the complexity of an increasingly interwoven world, and not run from it.

[Collective Intelligence | 14 October 2015 - Human Mind Project]

Works Referenced:

Barnett, Ronald. “University Challenge: Division, Discourse and Democracy.” Postdigital Science and Education. Vol.1, 2019, pp.283-287.

“Collective Intelligence.” The Human Mind Project. 14 Oct. 2015. https://humanmind.ac.uk/events-2/events/collective-intelligence-14-october-2015/

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. 2016. "Conceptualizing New Learning." In Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, e-Learning Ecologies. Routledge NY: forthcoming.

Jandrić, Petar. “We-Think, We-Learn, We-Act: the Trialectic of Postdigial Collective Intelligence.” Postdigital Science and Education. Vol.1, 2019, pp.275-279.