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I read recently that modern humans are more gracile and have slightly smaller brains than our archaic ancestors. Clearly we don't need the muscle mass of the Neanderthals, but one argument about relative brain size is that we don't need individual intelligence as much either, since we have to a large degree substituted social intelligence for it.
John Donne Meditation XVII
We are truly pack animals. We rely deeply on each other. We take care of each other.
In this month's articles, the power of groups for students becomes clear in both Diego Navarro's article about the peer networks that support at-risk students in the Academy for College Excellence (ACE) project and in the Listening to Students essay, whose three authors describe the crucial help they got in coming to college with a “posse.”
Sometime we stumble on this understanding by accident, as we did at the university where I began my academic career. Having enrolled groups of students in clusters of courses for our own convenience, we found, serendipitously, that those students were more successful than ones who were not part of a cohort. But often, at least at large universities, the centrifugal force of general education requirements that can be met by hundreds of courses scatters students in the crucial first two years of college.
We could be more intentional about ensuring that all students have their posses. We could routinely help them form study groups, for instance, which Uri Triesman long ago showed enabled African-American students not only to succeed in mathematics courses but to persist in and graduate from college. Peer tutoring is also beneficial to both the tutee and tutor—as a Nobel laureate I once heard speak at the University of Virginia said, “The most underutilized educational resource in universities is students.”
Experience in well-designed study groups (in Triesman's study, the faculty gave the groups worksheets that had especially hard problems for the students to solve collectively) can also ease the transition into a workforce that increasingly relies on teamwork and the informal exchange of information among peers (see John Seely Brown's The Social Life of Information for a discussion of this phenomenon).
Despite their perhaps larger-than-average tendencies towards independence, faculty too congregate. Adrianna Kezar and Susan Elrod's description of how interdisciplinarity becomes embedded in a college or university clearly demonstrates that the process begins with the development of “a common understanding of interdisciplinary learning goals” and relies on a network of faculty and staff committed to the work. That is how campus cultures evolve—by moving the group consensus.
What Marcia Baxter Magolda brings to the discussion is an understanding of how faculty and students can come together to form “learning partnerships.” In doing this, educators have to come out from behind the lectern, abandon what I think of in my own case as the “let-me-tell-you-how-it-is” tone, and sit down with their students, in order to reason together—a relinquishing of authority that can require faculty members to evolve, as well as their students. What students get out of these partnerships is help in moving from submergence in their peer and familial groups to “self-authoring”—“the capacity to define one's own beliefs, identity, and social relations” so that they can operate interdependently rather than dependently, as children do, or independently, as scholars too often do.
One fear about online learning is that it will isolate students, leaving them without any posse-like support as they work their way through what Yewande Salau calls “the sometimes-rocky college experience.” That may be true of the worst examples of the type, but it's been a long time since I heard anyone fear that email will necessarily be a depersonalizing experience.
We're starting to explore the socio-educational possibilities of the new media in the development of multi-player games (see the article on the UVA Bay Game in the May/June 2011 issue of Change), in simulations, and in the linking of off-site projects to the campus. But we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is, not to mention will be, possible in this brave new world of Web 2.0.
One of the most interesting developments in social media (98 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds who are online participate in one or more such sites), according to Microsoft's dana boyd, is the emergence of niche sites, which we too could create.
To be sure, these virtual communities don't look much like the slumber parties that Kiersten Chresfield describes in Listening to Students. But there, like-minded people do form groups in which they exchange information, keep in “touch,” form social bonds, and create social norms. In an educational context, the adult role could be not to control what goes on (young people as well as adults very much want to be in charge of their own spaces) but to ask critical questions and raise the quality of the interaction, as the educators in Baxter Magolda's learning partnerships presumably do.
One intriguing description of the “.net world” is that it is “a nervous system writ large” (Jon Udell). It is beginning to enable an exponential growth in the social intelligence with which we have augmented our individual intelligences (think of the power of crowdsourcing).
So, having started this editorial in the 17th century, I think I'll end it in the 21st, with two more intriguing quotations I heard recently:
“Chance favors the connected mind”
Steven Berlin Johnson and “Cheap connection is the revolution of our time.”
Seth Grodin
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