Collaboration

I do believe humans have a basic instinct to “interact and work as a group”. When you think back to how the Pyramids, or even this country was built, there had to be collaboration of individuals working together to reach a common end. Technology has rapidly increased our ability to work collaboratively. In the past, people would fly all over the world to hold business meetings. Now the same meetings can be held from the comfort of one’s home or office. I can now be in the same class as someone on the other side of the earth, and we can be working on solving the same problem.

Rheingold discussed hoe people use collaboration to feed their own self-interests, but when you can find mass groups of people with the same interests, the payoff for the individual can be even greater. Technology allows people with a common cause to unify easily, form groups, and attract more individuals. With different members of the group having strengths in different areas, they can teach others, who will then construct new knowledge for themselves. This is more likely to happen because the individual already has an interest in a given topic. The technology allows the person to find many experts from which to learn.

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

I responded to Duane Coleman and Shane Fairbairn