Module 3 Overview
Module three touched on topics including collective intelligence, digital authorship and rhetoric and persuasion in digital writing.
Collective intelligence and crowdsourcing have many parallels. Both are used with the intention of people coming together, each with their own unique body of knowledge, to answer questions, help one another and hopefully create something that is meaningful and useful. According to Rheingold (2014), "it isn't easy to think of a realm of human behavior that has not been influenced in some way by a form of mass collaboration." Politics, technology, inventions, and even the small things like a family deciding where to eat or what movie to watch, is all influenced by collaboration, and people coming together with their ideas to create something bigger (or settle the essential debate between burgers and pizza for dinner 🍕).
Module 3 Thoughts and Reflection
Before reading Module 3, I had never heard of collective intelligence or crowdsourcing. Upon reading it, I took time to think back and reflect on what examples of this I have seen, or been a part of, in the online realm. The Reddit activity allowed me to understand exactly what collective intelligence and crowdsourcing can look like, and helped me think about other examples I had seen. I would say that within what I see regularly, most collective intelligence and crowdsourcing examples that come to mind are within Facebook groups. Facebook groups are subgroups within the app that users can request to join, and usually cater to specific niche's, interests or hobbies. I frequently look at Facebook groups to see if I would like to join any new ones, and have come across groups that include adopted children looking to find their biological parents, sourdough bread bakers tips and tricks, bug identification in Virginia, and more. As I browse these groups, I notice that most of the communication is from users looking for help, and the response is almost always overwhelmingly helpful. Reflecting on how these crowdsourcing groups work, I thought back to participation culture and how being an active participant in these groups creates an atmosphere of help, guidance and education.
I very much enjoyed reading about rhetoric within writing, specifically the separation between what the author means and what the reader perceives. Once upon a time, I was majoring in secondary English education, and my favorite aspect of the major, and the classes that came along with it, was hearing everyone's different perspectives on the same stories. We could all read the same story, and all come away from it with entirely different interpretations. While this is entirely different from the point made in the module, which is that it may be up in the air for who is responsible for creating meaning, I enjoyed making that connection, and it made me think that maybe different interpretation is not a bad thing, but rather the reader takes what they need from the material, and everyone's needs are different. Of course, this will differ depending on the reading, and if the material is education, it may be best that material is interpreted the same by everyone! Topics such as rhetoric, interpretation and reading material in general can be debated until the end of time... but maybe that's the whole point?
Until next time,
Brianna
References
Rheingold, H. (2014). Net smart: How to thrive online. MIT Press.
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