Day: November 5, 2004

I have been listening to James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdon of Crowds” while I am working on other mundane tasks. The books offers some very interesting examples of group intelligence and the advantage of a group decision over the decision of a “smart individual.” The way Google works and the success of “ask the audience” on the program “Who wants to be a millionaire” are examples.

The decision of a group provides an advantage when:
1) there is diversity of opinion within the group
2) individuals have some source of information or opinion providing the basis for their decisions
3) there is independence of decisions
4) there is a method for aggregating the decisions from individuals

So, Google can make great predicts about what you want to read when you conduct a search because the links positioned at the top of the search results page:
1) is based on the use of links TO the pages on the list by many web page creators
2) these web page creators selected the pages they would link to for purposeful reasons
3) the web page creators were largely working independently, and
4) Google has the program to quickly combine this information

I have been trying to decide if this model applies to the recent presidential election. My democratic bias leads me to conclude that the crowd was not functioning independently – too many swift boat and flip-flop ads.

I am left to wonder – what problems could we solve if we could somehow use the Internet to sample and combine collective intelligence?

My own effort to use this process is based on a database of web resources I operate. I maintain a page that automatically lists the top 15 sites visited following a query of my database. The general idea is that I might be able to identify trends in what educators want to know about technology and perhaps use such insights in some way. Presently, two ISTE sites focused on standards have moved to the top of the list. Educators are concerned about standards! If you happen to check this same site in a couple of months, I wonder if this focus will still be evident.

In June, the Monitor On Psychology contained the summary of a research study contrasting discovery learning with direct instruction. The summary (the original is not freely available online) describes a study by Klahr, Chen and Fey that either directly instructed 3rd and 4th graders how to form meaningful hypotheses regarding the question of how the steepness and length of a ramp influence how far a ball rolls from the end of a ramp or allowed the children to explore the ramp on their own. The children learned and were more likely to transfer understanding when directly instructed.

My concern is that educators will confuse pure “discovery learning” and student-centered learning. Way back when, Ausubel differentiated direct instruction from discovery learning and noted that both could result in meaningful or rote learning. I would guess Ausubel would label a technique in which “teachers did not intervene beyond suggesting a learning objective” as rote discovery.

Note in the analysis of this study, one critic noted that “I would like to see a replication with guided discovery.” So would I.