Activity #4: Collective Intelligence

After a week of participating in a collective intelligence activity on education through Google Docs, I was not very happy with the experience.  My frustrations with this project may be due to the fact that I am not very comfortable with my Google Doc skills.  There might be ways to find out who added various sections of the text and images, but the revision history does not identify the members of our class.  If I knew who added what, I would talk to them before rearranging or deleting certain items.  I found it distracting that the text was on multiple pages, in different sizes, and in different fonts.  I was annoyed that there were huge blank spaces between text and pictures that I could not figure out how to correct.  On Friday, I tried to rearrange some of the text and unify it through font size and bullet points.  I gave up after the first page or two when I could not figure out how to condense our document onto less pages.  I thought about assigning everyone a color of text so that we could easily identify who wrote what, but we were already wrapping up the collective intelligence activity at this point.  I wish there was a way to annotate and comment on what others write without including it as a main part of the text.  

I think the collective intelligence style of learning has the potential to be beneficial to students, but it needs either a student leader or teacher to take charge in some way.   An outline, color coding, or some guidelines for organization (ex. pictures all on one page, quotes on another page, videos on another, etc.) would greatly benefit the readers of the finished text.  It would help to give somebody the authority to determine an organizational style so that the piece of “collective intelligence” becomes a cohesive, reflective outline of information rather than a scrambled list of notes without documentation.  Collective intelligence is probably best used for pre-writing activities and brainstorming for projects where thoughts are encouraged to be experimental and broad-ranged.  It would be great for students to use while brainstorming what they already know about a topic or reviewing what they have learned.  In my classroom, we will be using collective intelligence techniques using sticky notes this week.  As we learn about complex patterns, each student will be prompted to use pattern principles to transform polka dots into a complex pattern.  The students will draw their pattern on the sticky note, stick it to the chalkboard, and eliminate any repeat designs.  This CI activity is aimed to remind students that there are many opportunities to fulfill project requirements in art class with creative, individualized results.