Module 3

I believe that humans definitely have an inclination to group together. One only has to look at the cliques that form in middle school to discover that people do group together and very often there is a heirarchy among the groups. In my opinion, people with a common goal tend to group together. Perhaps these groups form to create a synergistic effect in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In Rheingold’s video, he makes reference to the need for hunters to group together in order to be successful. I feel that this need to group is innate and can be traced back through evolution to the days in which grouping was an absolute necessity to survive. I also believe that people tend to group together in order to gain acceptance and to share common interests. If you have ever seen a really good movie but had no one to share that experience with, then the experience itself looses its value to an extent.

Technology can definitely foster collaboration among people. Look at the popularity of facebook for example. If I need to talk to any of my co-workers over the weekend or after hours about something work related, I chat with them on facebook. Learning can also be collaborative through the use of technology. For instance, with my 7th graders we do an at home lab in which students need to post their data on Google Docs. By the time they are through, students have 130 sets of data to work with instead of just their own. Additionally, sites such as http://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/ allow learners worldwide to post real time data regarding the migration of butterflies. Blogs such as this can also serve to be collaborative as well.