During Howard Rheingold’s 2008 TED talk he traces a path of human development based on an inherent instinct to collaborate. Citing everything from mastodon BBQ parties to the modern economic engine, he deftly points out how our base programming may be wired to collaborate more than to dominate and defeat. While acknowledging the shrinking place of the survival-of-the-fittest, he speaks of this emergent culture of cooperative arrangements with a hopeful tone. And, I choose to believe him. Now, there are examples of positive and negative cooperative arrangements throughout history. Some simply wanted to become king of the proverbial hill –generally for no real reason other than to prove it was possible. I imagine the populous of the world as pockets of cooperative arrangements akin to the hemispherical bubbles circling the drain after a bath. Some are countries, some are small religions, some are global industries, and some are just what is leftover. Normally, the bubbles will collide together, losing structure, and draining away with the bathwater. But, If the conditions are just right, and each bubble is strong enough to stay together, yet pliable enough to bend and merge without breaking, a single hemispheric bubble remains on top of the drain after everything else has washed away.
I like to believe that is how Rheingold sees it. If cooperative arrangements and collaboration are humankind’s basic instinct, we have a chance of not washing it all down the drain.
Of course, to reach that point we need to transform and re-educate. We need to teach as if collaboration is our first and most basic instinct. Thankfully, we have entered an era characterized by explosive growth in global communication between individuals, not just corporations and governments. Mobile phones, the semantic web, social networking, Twitter, and the promise of cloud computing increasingly support this collaboration. Constructivist theorists like D.J. Cunningham support the need for students to talk to each other, understand each other's viewpoints, and take responsibility for their own learning. Vygotsky called for strong relationships between learners, their culture, and appropriate mentors.
Rheingold calls for us all to begin and participate in the necessary “transdisciplinary discourse” to make this transformation possible. In education, that discourse must involve the _isms. What cooperative arrangements can be forged between educational theorists to create the ways of teaching necessary to foster and build a culture of collaboration?
The means exist.
The will to change must follow.
Very well written! I learn more about blogging every time I read your post. I like how you had links high lighted within the blog. This will be a goal for my next post...
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the analogy of the bubble. When I was thinking of it, I thought of my generation as one going down the tube :) We were not raised in such a collaborative environment. The last generation was introduced to technology when it was a little more isolated. I think that Social Networking is going to bring a more collaborative culture to being. How that is harnessed and embraced will have an impact on the direction of society. I think that it will also impact education and how teachers interact and present information for learning to students.
I think social networking and the precursors of cloud computing and the personal web we talked about earlier, are already having a direct impact on student learning and society's direction. However, I think it is too early to say if that direction/influence is positive or negative. I am not even sure whose definition we could use to start the conversation.
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