Johnson Module 3 Blog

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

http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Maximizing_Impact/

TED Conferences, LLC (2005). (Video program). Howard Rheingold: The new power of

collaboration. Retrieved from

http://www.ted.com/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html