The concept is pretty much similar to crowdsourcing. It is heavily based on an old philosophy that a group of people can acheive a greater good than one great genius. The book 'the wisdoms of crowds' by James surowiecki had provided a great push towards the idea especially in corporate and industrial world. Paret's and colleagues' work show that how students have built a machines without a single teacher's help. In fact, large projects require distributed intelligence and this idea is very beautifully implements in systems that we use today: like GPs where a group of 24 satellites work together coherently to acheive a common goal. Similary, the same idea is used to picture a black hole by using telescope across the global and scientists working in a distributive system. 

However, as Aditiya and Roy pointed out that any distributive system has two dimensions: material dimension, where materials provide intelligence to do a particular task and social dimension, where group coordinate to have a shared aim.

To acheive something through distributed intelligence in secondary and higher school environment is rather difficult because of growing age and emotional development-- a role of teacher/instructor becomes more challenging. 

References:

1. Pea, R. D. (1994). Seeing what we build together: Distributed multimedia learning environments for transformative communications. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 285-299. Also reprinted In Koschmann, T. D. (Ed.). (1996). CSCL: Theory and practice of an emerging paradigm (pp. 171-186). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

2. Pea, R. D. (2004). The social and technological dimensions of scaffolding and related theoretical concepts for learning, education, and human activity. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(3), 423-451.