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The web 2.0 construct provides us with an interesting way into the question at-hand – What kinds of tools offer the greatest opportunity for leveraging critical design elements towards the goal of designing environments that nurture collective intelligence? As Bryan Alexander points out, the term itself embodies a particular version of the history of the Web – one that makes a strong claim about a paradigmatic shift in how we interact in digital, networked spaces. Educators have taken notice of the social software design features that cluster in the web 2.0 construct, and it is these aspects that deserve our full attention.

A line of reasoning that is very much in synch with the web 2.0 construct, which is taken up substantively by the New London Group, is concerned with the gap between the design of learning spaces in schools versus workplaces. These authors argue that established trends in workplace and organizational learning (that can be attributed to the impacts of globalization, and networked mobilities) which educational designers need to pay attention to, include:  diversity as asset (rather than liability), proliferation of communication channels and related literacies, climate of rapid change and flexibility, teamwork and increased importance of collaborative work skills, multiskilled workers, constant on-the-job learning, hybrid forms of communication with a renewed attention to post-literate forms of “secondary orality” (Ong, 1971).

We are going to look, here, then, at how contemporary, networked media spaces are being designed, explicitly, to promote “collective intelligence” (Levy, 1997), which we will define here as tools that nurture: participation, serious play, a perpetual state of tinkering (learning etc…), microcontent authoring and improvement by community members, social networking that is linked with content authoring, and content authoring that has mobility across sites and tools, by mean of tagging, and other forms of annotation.

Participation

Web 2.0 applications are sometimes described as “social software”, highlighting the key role of design features that allow users to add value to a site by means of their active participation, which could take the form of tagging, adding or editing content, commenting, ranking content, linking etc… This functionality has prompted media analysts to consider the ways in which participatory designs contribute to the democratization of knowledge production on the Web. Clay Shirky talks about the transformation of everyday participation in collaborative writing projects, like blogging, as a process of “mass amateurization” that significantly shifts the historically venerated location of experts and the power of established practices of publishing conglomerates

Serious play

In spaces where consumers are also creators, the bar for participation is lowered. Collaborative work environments foster active engagement, with a more egalitarian mode of interaction than is often the case in formal learning spaces. As Bryan Alexander argues, the unit of productive activity in web 2.0 environments is not “the page” or “the finished product”, but rather, “microcontent”, which refers to the typically restricted scope of content generated by participants. And so in Wikipedia, an author can change a single word in an existing article, or on a blog, can post a comment, rather than contributing an entire blog entry. This attribute of contemporary, networked, digital spaces enables meaningful participation to occur before an expert, or polished level of absolute competence is realized.

Perpetual state of tinkering (learning etc…)

In learning environments where content is constantly being altered, one finds a design for the representation of knowledge as “open source”. That is to say, as a shareable resource that is unfinished, and literally available for revision anytime and anywhere that participants can access the site. Brian Lamb’s discussion of wikis highlights the design features of wikis that encourage and support a relationship to knowledge as “persistently beta”.

Microcontent authoring and improvement by community members

Think about the organization of content in a knowledge management system for course design, like Vista. Now think about how content comes into existence in a wiki, like Wikipedia, or indeed, the wiki we are using in this course. Vista is designed to limit the flow of content by means of a silo architecture, where you can move around from place to place, but rather like a traditional museum, you can’t touch anything, or put something of your own on display. Apart from the Forum and the Assessment tools, interactivity in Vista is reduced to button clicking. Whereas in a wiki, with its endlessly editable pages, openness is part of the design for learning, and indeed, for participation itself.

Social networking that is linked with content authoring

Social software applications tend to merge and blur binary distinctions between public and private, owned and shared, open and closed. With participation linked to the creation of content, content becomes linked to aggregates of participants. On a blog, for example, the content includes textual and or graphical material that is topical, as well as links to other sources/sites, and links to other blogs. The linking feature mediates the construction of communities of practice. Sites with mapping capabilities, likeCommunity Walk support collaborative projects by combining Google Map data with a flexible editing tool that allows users to add rich multimedia content directly to specific map locations, including text, images, URL’s etc…