When doing some further reading into the discourses listed in reader 1, I stumbled across some interviews and speeches of Tim O'Reilly's that I found particularly interesting. The reader briefly mentions 'Harnessing collective intelligence' and in the fore mentioned clips he divulges further into this, describing collective intelligence as a 'global brain' (Tim O'Reilly Keynote for 2011 NDIIPP/NDSA Partners Meeting).
In our last group chat we briefly touched on the subject of collective intelligence and the O'Reilly interviews added to this by suggesting that one persons thoughts can only go so far. He states that the idea of a 'global brain is based on a man/machine symbiosis' and even though he is discussing the world wide web, this does apply to our every day lives and even our learning. If we want to know something, we may ask whoever we are with, but if they don't know the answer, we ask google. If I want a recipe, I use google, which enlists thousands of other peoples to chose from. If i don't feel very well , I google my symptoms and thousands of other peoples opinions and similar circumstances appear in front of me (do not do this, no matter how trivial your symptoms are, google always says you are dying). People now work hand in hand with machine to develop web 2.0 based on machine data and human data. It sounds like a lot to get your head around, but when I buy something on ASOS and the website gives me suggestions on what else I might like, the similar alternatives are based on computer data of my most searched for items and what other people who looked at this item also looked at. (collective intelligence for dummies right there.)
The idea of a global brain is essentially, to a smaller scale, what we are doing on this course, as we work collectively to improve, reading and commenting on each others blogs, giving our opinions and potentially stimulating the writer to think outside their box or take a different route in their learning while learning ourselves.
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