Collective intelligence is defined as the ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks (Williams Woolley, Aggarwal and Malone, 2015). The module focuses on recursive feedback and how it improves learning compared to traditional education with feedback provided by the teacher and usually in the form of a grade. In this sense, the collective intelligence generated through recursive feedback is superior in terms of learning than the individual intelligence of a student learning a subject through individual reasoning and memory.

An aspect that caught my attention was the fact that traditional education separates overperforming students from underperforming students, while collective intelligence calls from the opposite: keep them together and the overall outcome will improve for all. This takes me to the "collective intelligence factor" that I want to discuss in this update.

Williams Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi and malone (2010) show the result of a randomized control trial experiment with 699 individuals divided into 192 groups. They extended the measure of "general intelligence" at the individual level and applied it to the group level to test the hypothesis that group collective intelligence—or the idea that a group’s aptitude for performing one task is correlated with its ability to successfully navigate other tasks—would be present. They found that group collective intelligence was found to exist separately from individual intelligence. Its main predictors are social sensitivity, the distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of female group members. I think these results are very interesting and suggest that mixing students regardless of their individual performance can help them learn more, and also, be better prepared for the world of work, and social life in general. 

Going into the details of Williams Woolley et al (2010) study, it is interesting to find that (and I quote from their summary): 

* Groups where a few people dominated the conversation had less collective intelligence than groups in which many members took turns talking.
* Social sensitivity, or the ability to empathize with and appreciate another’s viewpoint, is the only predictor that reached statistical significance. Social sensitivity was measured by the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, which measures how well one can make inferences about what others are thinking or feeling simply by looking at the eyes.
* Collective intelligence is positively correlated with the proportion of females in the group, as women score higher on social sensitivity. Groups with more females had a higher collective social sensitivity, leading to a higher collective intelligence.
* Group cohesion, satisfaction, and motivation were not found to be predictors of collective intelligence.

I find very important evidence that diversity is a godd thing, in terns of voices heard, group composition. It would be interesting to look at diversity defined not only by voices or gender but also by nationality, culture, disabilities, etc.

Geoff Mulgan, CEO of Nesta (UK), presents a podcast "How Collective Intelligence Can Change the World", where he makes a case not only for humans collaborating but also for humans and machines collaborating and for humans using technology to facilitate their collaboration. Also technology can help make groups more diverse and include minorities that otherwise could be left out.