Collective Intelligence - Blog Week 3

Coming from the business world one of my concerns is very much that our employees are prepared for the tasks in hand.  One of the crucial skills necessary in the workforce is teamwork and collaboration.  Many organizations have moved to team structures where one relies heavily on your team to get the job accomplished.  Training departments spend time and money training individuals to become part of a team and how to function in a team.  Therefore, with this thought in mind I was most interested in the aspects of the new technologies that relate to developing teams and team work.

I truly believe that you need basic competencies but you also need to learn, share and grow from the people around you so this is a very important component to develop.  Levy (2000) as cited in Jenkins, (2006) defines “collective intelligence” as the way to explore network communications by gathering online to embrace common enterprises (p. 39).  This concept has a lot of offer the business environment.  The concept is that it pools individual talent to accomplish a task.  One of the keys of success in an organization is to know the pool of talent you have and can tap as well as external resources.  One organization I worked for enlisted active managers, team leaders etc. to help educate new employees.  Instead of just using training staff we enlisted the help of seasoned managers to give their perspective and participate in training sessions.  It was beneficial to all but similar to a “collective intelligence” of an organization.

From what I understand both in medical and law school the work load is tremendous so students devise plans whereby they work in teams to learn the material.  These teams develop because of member needs. Often our education systems want “individualized” work stating it must be all your own work; however many business environments do not function in this manner, so one of the skills that seems to be evolving from the participatory cultures is that of collaboration and collective intelligence.  Jenkins (2006) shares an example of Hurricane Katrina where collectively it was possible to develop an overlay of “Google maps” to allow victims to find out information about specific locations (p. 41).

However, Jenkins (2006) stated, “most contemporary education focuses on training autonomous problem solvers and is not well suited to equip students with these skills” (p. 41).  There are some practices that have embraced this technology.  For example, the MIT Sea Grant College Program offers students in different schools to learn to cultivate eelgrass and share data.  We need to be able to create teams in schools internally and externally whereby we allow individual talents or strengths to cultivate and develop. What seems to happen as Jenkins (2006) describes we seek to develop “generalists” (p. 42).  Whereas, giving students an opportunity to problem solve in teams with a wider community will prepare them for the 21^st century workplace.  Specialists that cross standard boundaries will find jobs in the next century.

Considering Green’s model of literacy I’m really not sure how this fits into team work since it seems to pertain to texts other than perhaps the cultural dimension Lankshear and Knobel (2011) mention where the text and information is in relation to “real life practices” (p. 175).

References:

Jenkins H.J. (2006)., Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21^st  Century  Retrieved on 9/26/2013 from:

http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2011) Literacies: social, cultural, and historical perspectives. Peter Lang

Publishing Inc., New York, NY

The Gread Literacy Debate - Blog Week 2

The Great Literacy Debate – Blog Week 2

               M. Rich (2008) awakens our interest in the literacy debate as to whether what we are seeing with the current generation prepares them adequately for the world.  As the headline questions “R U Really Reading?”  Do online sources of information equate to reading a book?  What counts as literacy?

               I feel that the important question we need to ask is how does the future look?  Will paper books exist in 20 years?  Will our next generation even consider picking up a physical book?  I can relate to this point with regard to maps.  I still like to see a paper map before heading out but my 22 year old son believes such action completely insane since we have a navigation system.  Is map reading a skill of the past? Access to information is via the internet like it or not we all reach for Google when a question arises.  An important developing skill will be retrieving information and confirming accurate content.  Is this literacy in tomorrow’s world? 

               Another important consideration I see is the fact that new literacies are more social than the independent contemplative thought process of reading a book.  The interchange changes the process and seems to create a desire to create change to the original form. A less accepting view of static information is developed.  This generation views content from screens and this particular medium is not confined to the written word but can be enriched by the visual sense and movement.  Consequently, the experience is different but not necessarily inadequate or bad. 

Hence as educators our role is to help prepare the next generation to function in society with different mediums and ways of interpreting information.   We must be prepared to adjust our views to a broader context.  And may be map reading will go the way of Sanskrit and unless we keep technical savvy perhaps we will become the illiterate! 

References:

Gillen, J. & Barton, D.  Digital literacies: A research briefing by technology enhanced learning phase of

teaching and learning research programme.  Retrieved from:

http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf

Rich, M. (2008). Literacy debate: online, R U really reading? Retrieved from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

 

The Power of Text

New literacies have evolved be they blogs, twitters, electronic news sources etc.  Today there is an abundance of information and we have access to it so readily at the touch of our fingers.  In fact in a sense we have information overload.   It is therefore, important to ensure that we qualify the information available and find out the accuracy of it. 

If I read an article in the newspaper or online one often finds as Lankshear and Knobel (2011) suggest “the text conveys virtually no factual detail of consequence” (p. 93) the reader is swayed by emotion than a rational standpoint.  Newspapers have notoriously created headings to attract readers.  Consequently, if I am interested in the topic or what it presents then I may check other sources to determine if the information is accurate.

Although, I tend not to look at blogs very much I did recently find one most useful.  My son had knee surgery and not just the normal ACL or MCL reconstruction but something a little more complicated.  We did of course get a write-up from the doctor of what to expect and how to proceed etc.  However, I felt I needed a little more information that would assist us through the process.  One of the modes I turned to was a journal found online by someone who had gone through the same surgery and documented her recovery.  I found this detailed report written from a patient’s perspective as a wonderful source.  It outlined what to expect along the way and all the little problems you encounter with some options of how she solved them, i.e. just showering – the tricks.  This text may not have been available a few years back but the sharing of the experience proved a most valuable learning experience.  Looking back now both my son and I can truly relate to what was written.  Why this was so valuable was the perspective it was written from.

Another type of text I look toward those relating to the training and development field.  I enjoy reading articles that may inform me of trends within the training domain.  It may spark an idea for a program or enrich an existing program or alter the way I do something. The text allows me to learn and keep abreast in the field. 

Reference:

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2011) Literacies: social, cultural, and historical perspectives. Peter Lang

               Publishing Inc., New York, NY