One more set of pedagogical musings…

Okay, so stay w/ me here for a minute…this WILL turn out to be relevant!

My husband just passed on to me an article from the “science and technology” section of the Feb. 14th edition of The Economist, entitled “Decisions, decisions: what people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions.” Beginning with the premise that collectively-made decisions are more better than those made by individuals, the article contrasts two modes of decision-making: combined decisions (such as the allocation of jobs in a group), and consensus decisions, in which the group makes a single collective choice. The focus of the article was on the latter, and the argument was that the process is improved if information is shared: the animals then have to evaluate the information supplied by others, before making their own “choices” (yeah, the language is a little problematic when applied to bees and ants, but you get the idea?)

The article went on to report on a range of studies, concluding that the ability of bees (for instance) to quickly identify the best site for a new hive depends on the interplay of their interdependence in communicating the whereabouts of a new site and their independence in confirming this information.  What’s important here is the balance between independent investigation and sharing the collection of information.

So I’m thinking that this analysis is relevant to why our recent exercise in selecting our upcoming films-and-texts together didn’t quite work in the way Laura and I imagined it would. Because most of you couldn’t access the archive, to see what others were selecting, you couldn’t vote in reference and response to others’ selections. Each unit had too little information. And so the “emergent” process of gathering yourselves into groups of 5 or 6, each around a different text (which is what we imagined might happen) didn’t. All remained units, each with partial information. And perhaps some of the diversity of possibility–of a range of texts beyond science fiction??–didn’t get played out.

Ah, vey. On to the next “social” (“artful”? “technological”?) experiment!