Group Activity and the Emerging Technologies

Do you believe that humans have a basic instinct to “interact and work as a group,” as Rheingold proposed in his discussion of the evolution of Wikipedia as a collectively developed encyclopedia?
The group is actually a dimension of each of us, and according to the person, not really that less important than self. Such are social forces. There are human forces as well, equally as important in our survival as our own selves, or social forces, or family forces, another important dimension of a human being. This is all demonstrable and is nearly axiomatic. Witness sacrifices an individual will make for his family or friends or mankind, and you will see this pattern of behavior demonstrated. This is nothing really new.
People become withdrawn from their groups and become “prisoners” as Rheingold states, or suspicious of those they should be collaborating with because of their individuation from their group. Communication solves these problems and people will collaborate and thrive. Good social forces drive people to collaborate and bad social forces suppress a person’s survival as or through the group, family, mankind, and certainly as self.
These two forces play on the United States today as well as most cultures across the planet. This is nothing new either. Good and bad, though, have to be defined in terms of “who’s side are you really on”. Rheingold touches on this as well as the question of man’s basic goodness, asking the question: “will man always choose to devour the commons”?
The answer to that question is “not as long as he is aware of who he really is” - That the planet is no less important to his own survival than his own person. So, obviously being one of thoss people, unless he’s being rhetorical only, he is somewhat shocked that agencies like Wikipedia seem to have the intentions that they do – and elect to improve the common knowledge base without any apparent means to profit personally and selfishly. He also mentions other “altruistic” companies. I can recall where successful business or politics insisted on a minimum of similar intentions, but those days are gone and many have not witnessed that reality.
Wikipedia is an incredible phenomenon. It is totally new in my experience. It represents a collaboration on a worldwide scale to the betterment of each of us in the area of valid common knowledge as well as informed knowledge that is continually reviewed and edited. It is one of the most popular sites on the internet and attests to the intentions and activities of its founder as well as answering the question about man collaborating with man to his betterment.

How can technology facilitate collaboration among learners based on constructivist principles?

It’s doing it through most of its communication programs and programs like Wikipedia.
The processes of filing inputs and storing them for retrieval is purely constructivist in design and application. Collaboration through any number of new technological devices is made faster and more convenient by e-mail, cell phones, laptops, chat programs, blog programs like this one, instant messaging, and a huge number of similar applications.
Learning, especially in the area of problem based, science education, utilizing remote sensing devices has been extremely successful as an enhancement to learning and is fully constructivist. Here the student collaborates with professional scientists in real time along the lines of their study. This was something that was hardly practical before the emergence of the new technologies. The extension of this to a global community might be its most important potential to help student learning.

“Howard Rheingold: Way-New Collaboration”