Rheingold presented an effective case for the instinctive
forming of groups to work together and solve problems from the beginning of history
until now. He suggested that if people
had not worked together, for example, how would they have first been able to
bring down a huge dinosaur, and distributed the meat so that it did not spoil? In response to the prisoner game, Rheingold
quoted Eleanor Ostrom as saying “People are only prisoners if they consider
themselves to be.” New forms of
cooperation, Rheingold posits, have always helped create new forms of wealth. These new forms of cooperation have been
assisted by enabling technologies, which led to the development of eBay,
Google, Wikipedia, and so forth. According to Rheingold, Wikipedia was jointly developed by thousands of volunteers, and contains
approximately 1.5 million articles in several hundred languages. It is an invaluable tool to billions of
people, and is only available because of the collaboration of those thousands
of people who worked cooperatively to develop it. Rheingold surmised that people work cooperatively
because doing so is in their best interests.
I believe people do have a basic instinct to work cooperatively and that
is because there has always been some form of benefit, or “wealth”, to those
who do.
Technology can continue to facilitate collaboration by
providing tools whereby learners can collectively research, read, write, and
share information that provides benefit or wealth to all participants. These tools can be blogs, wikis, chat
programs, synchronous online meeting software, Skype, mobile technologies, and
the like. In Maximizing the Impact of Teacher
Collaboration the authors posit
that “Collaboration between teachers can be a powerful tool for professional development
and a driver for school improvement,” further when used correctly “Structured professional collaboration that focuses on improved
instruction benefits both teachers and students” (2008). This confirms the position Rheingold
presented of effective collaboration being innate in human beings since the
beginning of time, and provides insight into the benefit of such cooperative collaboration for learners and instructors.
References
Education.com (2008). Maximizing
the impact of teacher collaboration. Retrieved
from
TED Conferences, LLC (2005). (Video program). Howard Rheingold: The new power of
collaboration. Retrieved from
