Collective intelligence or collaborative intelligence refers to the concept where people working together towards a learning goal or a project will, by virtue of their collaboration, end up with a better outcome or result and in the process improve their learning, knowledge formation and social skills.

For an example, I will return to what I know. I am a screenwriter and occasionally teach creative writing workshops. It would be very hard to overstate the importance of feedback in the journey of creative writing. The old way of doing things, would be for students to write their stories and then receive feedback from their instructor. Then they can use the feedback to improve their stories.

When take into account the affordance of collaborative intelligence and apply it to this same situation, what we would have is a classroom where you are not only responsible for your own writing, but you are also responsible for reading your classmates work and providing constructive feedback. As mentioned in the e-learning ecologies course, this creates an extra motivation (you want your writing to be extra good because your peers will read it and at the same time you want to provide good quality feedback) but it also makes every student invested in the success of the others.

Not only that but receiving  feedback from so many different sources and perspective opens your eyes to know that everyone has a different opinion and different way to interpret things. It’s easier (with a large sample) to discern good feedback from bad. To really know what is working (everyone liked it) and what isn't (nobody liked it). Knowing how to give and receive feedback in this case is almost as important as knowing how to write a good story, and using this particular learning affordance reinforces that idea and strengthens the notion of knowing is that writing is rewriting, it’s about constant rounds of feedback and improvement and that is not something that a person can (or al least should) do alone.

A study found in the National Library of Medicine examined working groups that relied on using collaborative intelligence and found that the use of methods that facilitated this way of working resulted in a stronger sense of responsibility for the end product and heightened ownership of the collaborative process itself, in regard to a group assignment. This means that students ended up putting more value in their their work and their process rather than the grade they got.

In this career path this is extremely important. No one will judge you by your grades, only by the quality of your work. Therefore it is particularly useful to foster this way of thinking from early on.

Reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5132366/