Collective Intelligences... The Magnificence of Wikipedia!

Personally, I am fan of Wikipedia. If I am ever in need of information, I will nearly always go to wikipedia first and utilise it as a starting point. I was surprised to learn that wikipedia is actually more accurate than I originally thought. I was always told that wikipedia is unreliable and should not be used in a university setting. My views have changed a little bit now. I would use wikipedia for ideas and to locate further references and resources but I would never utilise it as my primary resource.


Advantages of Wikipedia:

1. Relatively reliable source of information
2. Promotes collaborative learning - multiple authors
3. Authors are required to reference information - adds to reliability factor

Disadvantages of Wikipedia:

1. Can be edited by anyone - no matter of credentials
2. May be bias (or possibly multiple biases)

The concept of bias was interesting to consider and can exist in any text. A persons background will influence the way that they view the world and how they assess and present information. For example, two historical texts which were produced in different countries can conflict with other. Each side will create a representation of the world that fits in to their own cultural and social context. The same exists with any source of information. The fact that wikipedia has so many authors, will most likely promote various viewpoints and therefore biases. I think that this can be an advantage over relying solely on text books or other online resources, which may only have one view point, carrying its own set of author intentions.

Collective Intelligence is a form of group intelligence which is created by users collaborating as a community and sharing knowledge. 

Collective Intelligences function in two ways: 

1. To promote collective group opinions, through the use of resources such as google, tag clouds and word diagrams.
2. To promote collaborate group work, through the use of resources such as wikipedia

Another interesting topic that we studied this week was the place of collective intelligence in the classroom. In an article that we were asked to consider, school students were given the opportunity to utilise any technologies that they wish in an exam to answer test questions. The purpose of this study was to allow students to be involved in the collaborative construction of knowledge. This is so different to the traditional tests that I undertook while in school, where such collaborative constructivism would be considered cheating. I am in two minds about this study. I think that students should have the autonomy to collaborate with other students while in the classroom, but I am in conflict that students be allowed access to phones and technological resources while they are sitting an exam.

I found this amazing resource to create word clouds based on the insertion of text. I decided to place my own blog into this website and this is what I discovered... So, it turns out that I am currently unable to turn my word cloud code into an actual word cloud. If anybody reads this and knows how to do it, please let me know and we can work collaboratively to conquer this technology!

SUCCESS!