Thammasat University students are cordially invited to download a free Open Access book at this link that should be useful for readers interested in psychology, sociology, sociobiology, political science, business, computer science, mass communications, and related subjects:
Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Collective Intelligence: Patterns in Problem Solving and Innovation is by Professor Rolf K. Baltzersen, who teaches in the Department of Education, ICT and Learning, a part of Faculty of Teacher Education and Languages at the Østfold University College in Halden, Norway
Professor Baltzersen has researched collective intelligence, mentoring, open textbooks and open educational resources (OER), active learning, digital storytelling, verbal metacommunication (metadiscourse, metatalk), teacher education research, cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), online education, digital competence, knowledge building, and the philosophy of technology.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of collective intelligence.
Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence that results from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications.
It may involve voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective IQ is a measure of collective intelligence, although it is often used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has also been attributed to bacteria and animals.
Pierre Lévy defines collective intelligence as
a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I’ll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals…
Collective intelligence contributes to the shift of knowledge and power from individuals to the collective. According to some researchers, open source intelligence will eventually generate better results than knowledge generated by proprietary software developed by corporations.
Professor Baltzersen writes,
In the new era of digital communication, collective problem solving is increasingly important. With the Internet and digitalization of information, large groups can now solve problems together in completely different ways than are possible in offline settings. These novel online technologies and practices challenge our conceptions of individualized human problem solving in various domains, including art, science, industry, business, education, technology, software design, and medicine. It is urgent that we rethink our understanding of intelligence in a profound way. Among scholars, collective intelligence (CI) is increasingly used as a broad, multidisciplinary term to describe new types of collective problem solving. This notion of intelligence is not about individual ability or computer algorithms; rather, it describes how collectives of people, both small and very large groups, solve problems. This book intends to give an overview of some of the most important basic problem-solving mechanisms that comprise CI. Throughout our evolution, our most extraordinary ability as humans is, without doubt, our ability to collaborate with each other. Our story is very much about how we gradually learned to solve problems together in increasingly larger groups. First, we started living in caves solving issues in small numbers, from there we formed villages, and, with time, the villages grew into kingdoms and nations. Today, many of us spend most of our time in a global online setting. In this new setting of billions of people, fresh ways of solving problems in large distributed groups are constantly being invented in a wide range of sectors. Open online innovation and citizen science are but a few examples of projects that center on open invitations, allowing anyone to join. In addition, various platforms and projects promote open online knowledge sharing, including the sharing of both knowledge products (e.g. online videos, Wikipedia) and knowledge subject to the Cambridge construction processes (e.g. argument mapping). There is also a growing awareness that complex wicked problems, like climate change or COVID-19, require innovative problem-solving approaches that build on the combined scientific and political efforts of individuals and groups all over the globe. The increasingly popular concept of CI attempts to encompass this development across various scientific fields. Concerning group size, studies of CI cover anything from small group cooperation in teams in the offline setting to large group cooperation in distributed online settings. While some CI researchers still primarily examine the Internet and development of a broad macro level, others focus on collaboration in small groups. However, the invention of the Internet undoubtedly renewed interest in CI.
Pierre Lévy coined the modern version of CI with the book Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. Inspired by the recent invention of the Internet, Lévy defines collective intelligence as a new universally distributed intelligence that constantly improves and coordinates itself in real time. For the first time in human history, the Internet made it possible for members of a decentralized community to interact with each other within the same virtual universe of knowledge. This made possible a new knowledge-producing culture that built on rapid and open exchange of data and ideas. Lévy predicted that this would lead to a fundamental change in how we think about ourselves. Knowledge will no longer be about established facts, but rather the essential part of an ongoing knowledge construction project that includes all humans. The fundamental premise is that nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and all knowledge resides in humanity…
In principle, the outreach is global to all people who have access to the Internet. This permits flexible and easy communication between persons who are located in very different places. These capabilities make it possible to scale up activities and increase human collective capability in a range of different ways. As a result, people share information and communicate with each other in a huge range of online environments. During the last decade, participatory technologies… have connected a large amount of people and become increasingly important. As the first generation of web software provided easy access to a vast amount of information, it was still technically difficult to publish information and produce web pages. The major change came with the second generation of Internet technologies, which made it easy for anyone to publish information and communicate with others. The Internet opened up a range of horizontal communication networks within social media, multiplayer online games and fan discussion communities. While the traditional mass media (television, radio, newspapers) had unidirectional links, the architecture in the networked information environment has multidirectional connections among all nodes. These networks are built around peoples’ initiatives, interests, and desires and are used to share all kinds of digital information such as texts, photos, and videos. In social media, individuals constantly produce short texts (e.g. Twitter), images (e.g. Facebook), or videos (e.g. YouTube). These short messages are part of an ongoing online social dialogue, and they are viewed by others immediately afterwards. Online cultural expressions and personal experiences have become a fundamental part of our daily life in the last decade. In addition, these new networks integrate local and global media and transcend traditional space limitations. A fundamental premise behind this development is the radical reduction of the cost of becoming a speaker. Because the cost is so low and it takes very short time to reach others over the Internet, more people can find each other and create something together. Before the age of the Internet, there were only a few people who published their knowledge and opinions to a wider audience, and the publishing channels were usually under editorial control. Now anyone that can afford a digital device (like a cell phone or laptop) can access the Internet and produce and publish digital information. One consequence is that the traditional expert model of knowledge production, which has been taken for granted for centuries, is now being challenged.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)