Talk Collective Intelligence with Henry Jenkins
4.8.10 | Join University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins for an online discussion next week about collective intelligence and its use in the classroom. The webinar will take place Thursday, April 15, at 7 p.m. (EST). To attend, visit the Elluminate Meeting Room.
The webinar is the third in Project New Media Literacies’ monthly professional development series for k-12 educators. The series aims to translate the new skills outlined in Jenkins’ whitepaper ”Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” into concrete learning experiences for the classroom.
Jenkins will lead participants in a discussion about collective intelligence and distributed cognition. If you’re not sure what that means, don’t worry.
Project NML explains in a post from its Learning Library:
Collective intelligence allows people to share their expertise with each other and work on solving problems in a collaborative way. Distributed cognition allows you to use tools, like Facebook or Wikipedia, to expand the pool of information your brain has access to.
The Learning Library is an online repository of learning activities or “challenges” that include video, discussion questions, tools and games from other websites and short curricular modules that you can use on your own or adopt for classroom use.
Whether or not you attend the webinar, these Learning Library challenges are worth spending some time on. Project New Media Literacies recommends these three challenges in preparation for the April 15 webinar: Monkeys on Typewriters, Swimming in Pools of Knowledge and Chains of Thought.
You can explore tools for collaborative writing online, see examples of wikis, and learn how to play a Wikipedia challenge game in the classroom.
In the video below, Riley Crane, a post-doctoral fellow at MIT, talks collective behavior with Stephen Colbert. Crane gained national attention earlier this year by building an online collaboration tool that made it possible to find balloons spread out across the country in just eight hours.
What other problems might collective intelligence help us solve?
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