‘We spent a good deal of time thinking about how accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase the motivation to learn and to solve problems, both individually and collectively.’
The article : Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age by Cathy N. Davidson makes me think that collaborative work itself could challenge the limited feature of the human brain, whose performance level is usually or relatively low when it has to deal with multitasking assignments. The conceptual breakthrough, which does not limit our ability due to the result from the experimentation described in the first part of this article is a lesson for me not to get depressed easily because of the negative consequence, which refers to ‘attention blindness’. Collaborative learning could be a savior of the insufficient inherent capability.
We are living in this world to enable an individual knowledge to be replaced with his/her community. An individual brain would be no longer more valid or highly valued than what it is now or it used to be, rather its collaborative mode would be appreciated or recognized to be an authentic qualification for human intelligence.
‘I think therefore I am’by Descartes is manipulated by ‘iPod therefore I am’, which could also be replaced by ‘We think therefore I am’. However this does not mean to say each person could learn less than before ; on the contrary s/he would learn more being motivated to enjoy further studies. Online collaborative projects, which I went through could therefore persuade me to think that the underline concept of competency lies in her/his connectivity and collaboration with outsides. The value of what is meant to be intelligent enough to cope with all issues of this coming era differs from that of definition without social network system.
How the World Wide Web has changed the world from DigiTeen Projects based on Flat Classroom Projects and WorkshopA from The 1001 Flat World Tales Project certainly not only show us the new process of learning in the 21st century but also give us the solution to challenge side effects of social network communication system. They could refer to how we can possibly manage or control the massive flow of information ; how we can be confident that what we are doing is on the right path ; how we could easily or efficiently live in the digital information era.
Things should be getting more convenient for us to learn, yet at the same time we have additional or extra burdens to be overseen and monitored constantly. Whether it is controllable or not also seems to rely on the potential of collaborate learning.
These projects running in the world premise not only save time and space but also give another credit to his/her own idea, which used to be owned by his/her exclusive confidential copyright since this would reflect his/her personal assessment. The more cooperate or collaborative you are, the better reflections you could expect from your society.
These projects remind me of the lyric of the song ‘Heal the World’ by Michael Jackson : ‘Heal the world to make it better place for you and for me…’ . Could we start making the world better place by means of having a collaborative project for you and for me at a micro level at first, which we would hope to extend to the globally created product?