A multi-disciplinary conversation about Collective intelligence – reflection on some missing elements

The mobile phone and its connectivity with the internet allows growing numbers of us to find, connect, and interact. That was the technological foundation for the original vision of cMOOCs (developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes) as a democratic learning experience, and connectivism as a learning theory for a digital age (Siemens 2005).

Collectivism, as discussed in a multi disciplinary context at Nesta http://www.nesta.org.uk/event/roots-collective-intelligence, relies on the same technological infrastructure. What is collectivism and how does it differ from connectivism? We heard that the Internet allows for a new form of activism for example, political. How do individuals participate? We were given the example of number of Facebook likes as an indicator of collective intentionality, a starting point. However, how to sustain collectivism i.e. participation, was a recurrent question; how does an individual move on from the Facebook click to participate?  Participating in connectivist learning opportunities requires good infrastructure design and from the individual curiosity, motivation to learn, to contribute, openness, digital literacy (a fair amount) and I would argue that digital fluency and socio-emotional experience are the elements that sustain on-going participation.

Intelligence. Summing up the day Colin Blakemore focused on intelligence. His considered opinion was that we hadn’t spent enough time talking about what we meant by intelligence. He is a cognitive neuroscience and so unsurprisingly, he also spent some time reflecting on the contributions made by the speakers who were cognitive scientists. Those mainly cohered around what, when and how collective intelligence occurs with when and what depending on group size (Robin Dunbar) how on noise reduction, competence, persistence, reputation (Chris Frith). Others concentrated on decision making as investigated in the laboratory; the role of argumentation in decision-making and the quality of decision making. This was a useful contribution as we had already heard that a binary response as the norm could be the problem for collectivism in political contexts. Also, it has some connection with learning science, where design for collaborative learning (i.e. group work) requires a joint task and the opportunity to propose ideas, discuss them with others, negotiate a solution to disparate ideas, and contribute to a shared outcome.

Overall, the multi-disciplinary approach was very successful. However, there was a sense that the individual was objectified. The subjective was largely missing from the day; purposefulness and socio-emotional experience. Therefore, it was interesting to learn about the fall off in Wikipedia contributions since bots were introduced. The explanation provided was that the bots were overly obedient to protocol and rules - another example of the clunkiness of bot interaction as described in a previous post and that the uniquely human nature of socio-emotional experience is so often neglected

Surely, design is important both for successful knowledge building and the socio-emotional experience of collective action.

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for a digital age. International journal of instructional technology and distance learning, 2(1), 3-38.

Spending a day with the Emotion Historians

This event https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2015/09/tears-and-smiles-programme/ was an opportunity to exercise some transdisciplinary thinking. Could emotion historians contribute to the scholarship of online and distance education?  Specifically, the issue of disembodiment when interpersonal interaction takes place online.

Descriptors assigning purpose to an emotion (e.g. mocking, patronising) peppered the day and emotion as culturally situated performance for control, or to resist control, was a strong theme to emerge. Emotion as a rational act expressed for strategic purposes although, there was some debate on ‘the complex emotion repertoire’ of Margery Kempe (a medieval mystic). While those around Kempe  perceived her behaviour as irrational it could be explained as a manifestation of illness. Self-report by Kempe, that sensory stimuli could  trigger strong emotion, would fit with the experience of some with neural evidence of temporal lobe epilepsy. 

Emotion as experienced and in particular socio-emotional experience, those feelings and thoughts embedded in the dynamic of an interpersonal interaction, did not feature. Understanding social emotions is important for a socio-cultural pedagogy based on the idea that students will co-construct knowledge through discussion, through sharing ideas. The negotiation of ideas can generate strong emotions and when it takes place online it is through written communication and is mediated by a digital device i.e. the physical other is unseen. ‘The textual face of the medieval poet’ did provide an eloquent account of using literary device such as metaphor and the multimodal  (through styling for example, embolden) to express emotion and achieve emphasis through writing  (as is the case when people interact online).  But once again, this account was confined to the expression of emotion and one-way interaction i.e. poet to reader.

Art history provided considerable resource throughout the day, an observer interpretation of an expressed emotion that is then reinterpreted by the historian.    By contrast social emotions rely on language,  spoken or written, and their history would require a different resource. So, while I enjoyed an illuminating set of talks, thank you, I am still searching for the history of those emotions, experienced and expressed, that are embedded in the social.