Widespread, coordinated, active: it is the collective intelligence, emerging from people and machines, it is nowadays made more powerful from the Internet. The meeting of individual brains continuously generates a kind of collective thinking. It’s just one of the moments of an intense work of the brain, cultural, life led by the intelligence of human beings.
Today it is much easier to access and move knowledge because millions of people are participating in its construction and are constantly writing, reformulating and discussing it. This was not possible before. Collective collaboration always existed, what changes is the scale and speed in the flow of information.
Pierre Lévy is the first philosopher who introduced the concept of collective intelligence in the debate on the interpretation of digital media with his visionary book, 1994: “Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace”.
Pierre Lévy defines collective intelligence as, “A form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I’ll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities“.
Nevertheless in this interview which he released in 1998 he states: “Collective intelligence is not a concept of my invention. It is somehow an invention of mankind. What is culture? It is the collective dimension of intelligence and since we possess this collective intelligence we are human beings. Collective intelligence is given by the collective memory and by the collective imaginary. We are what we are thanks to the existence of institutions, techniques, languages, systems of symbols, media”.
Pierre Lévy has a personal blog we have selected a fragment in which he gives his explanation of Collective Intelligence in the context of education.
From pierrelevyblog.com “Collective Intelligence for Educators“:
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
The collective intelligence that I am speaking about is not a miracle solution but a goal to reach. It emerges in the new algorithmic environment in interaction with personal and critical intelligence.
Stigmergic communication. Stigmergy means that people communicate by modifying a common memory. We should distinguish between the local and the global memory. In the local memory (particular communities or networks), we should pay attention to singular contexts and histories. We should also avoid ignorance of other’s contributions, non-relevant questions, trolling, etc.
Liberty. Liberty is a dialectic of power and responsability. Our power here is our ability to create, assess, organize, read and analyse data. Every act in the algorithmic medium re-organizes the common memory: reading, tagging, buying, posting, linking, liking, subscribing, etc. We create collaboratively our own common environment. So we need to take responsability of our actions.
Collaborative learning. This is the main goal of collective intelligence and data curation skills in general. People add explicit knowledge to the common memory. They express what they have learnt in particular contexts (tacit knowledge) into clear and decontextualized propositions, or narratives, or visuals, etc. They translate into common software or other easily accessible resources (explicit) the skills and knowledge that they have internalized in their personal reflexes through their experience (tacit). Symmetrically, people try to apply whatever usefull resources they have found in the common memory (explicit) and to acquire or integrate it into their reflexes (tacit).
The final slide above is a visual explicitation of the collaborative learning process. Peers working in a common field of practice use their personal intelligence (PI) to transform tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. They also work in order to translate some common explicit knowledge into their own practical knowledge. In the algorithmic medium, the explicit knowledge takes the form of a common memory: data categorized and evaluated by the community. The whole process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and vice versa takes place largely in social media, thank to a civilized creative conversation. Intellectual and social (or moral) skills work together!
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Sources: Tutti per uno: la forza nell’intelligenza collettiva, Due filosofi a confronto. Intelligenza collettiva e intelligenza connettiva: alcune riflessioni, Pierrelevyblog.com
Photos: The Opte Project Visualization – Pierre Levy’s blog.