lunch with Sirc

Time flies way too fast-- it's already Thursday and I'm just now really trying to think about the questions Geoff Sirc asked me at lunch last Friday.

I was spouting that I think collective intelligence is so great--and that when kids participate in it that they learn so much. And his question was along the lines of-- but what are they really learning?

Cheat codes for video games-- well this keeps them from having to problem solve to get there themselves-- is that actually good? I remember being a kid, before the Internet, following the higher level codes my sister would achieve in video games and then not knowing how to survive in those levels because I hadn't earned the right to be there. Is this what we want kids to learn.

They learn how to work together--they learn that together they can gain more knowledge than they can apart. But does it really work like that-- or do the hard workers do all of the work and the lazy kids just mooch off of them?

The thing that I think is most beneficial in collective intelligence with children is that they learn how to articulate their ideas to multiple audiences. They learn how to share what they are discovering, and they learn how to synthesize their knowledge with other bits of knowledge that are out there. They aren't just stringing facts together so they can tell someone they know all of this stuff--instead they are seeing that their knowledge is a piece of a much bigger puzzle. Collective intelligence makes its participants global learners--participants have to understand that there is always more knowledge to be gleaned.