Not all of these activities will take place online, but the results of each activity need [...]]]> The intrinsic motivation that results from collaborative social networks to compete and contribute for the good of the group is viral.  When groups are competitive, and individuals within those groups are rewarded by the group for contributions, super human results are often obtained (think ant colonies). 

Not all of these activities will take place online, but the results of each activity need to be tracked by the leader and recorded in the system, in order to make them available to students, who use them to measure the net worth of each others efforts.

This is the appeal we need to genearate within collaborative learning systems.  Project and task based group activites focused on common purpose, with feedback loops that encourage participation via competition. In addition to test scores, measurement of achievement needs to reflect the collaborators contribution to the group, and that feedback needs to be available in real time.

The user interface to enable this revolution is taking root in smart phones.  Touch screen, texting, iPhone/Android, and netbook devices are greeted eagerly by excited students given the opportunity to interact directly with sophisticated systems.  We are about to embark on a new phase in learning, as online collaboration goes mainstream.

Share/Save

Clay Shirky has made it clear that the cognitive surplus out there is [...]]]> All that time we spend watching tv, movies, surfing the web, tracking sports and playing games can be classified as passive cognitive activity.  Passive activity (also known as consumption) is not inherintly evil, but the opportunity that technology offers to produce and share, instead of consume, could change the dynamics of work and learning.  

Clay Shirky has made it clear that the cognitive surplus out there is huge:

How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

There are millions of American’s out there spending billions of man hours on tasks that are passive, instead of active and creative.  Are they just waiting for someone to invent a cause  that could motivate them to start producing, instead of watching or playing?

We can harness the surplus of cognitive activity in our educational systems by re-architecting the core rules of engagement.  We need to enable open, social networking systems as the platform for new educational systems.  Purpose driven learning projects will take root if we plant the seeds.  Thought leaders and teachers will become subject matter experts leading teams of doers, who just so happen to be learning. 

Open social systems encourage collaboration and group participation organically.  These systems, defined by collaborative applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, will foster exponential improvements in learning.  Group exposure to results, delivered to the group in higher quality and quantity (compared to existing systems), will add to the experience via competition and natural cognitive engagement.

Share/Save