Literacy of Cooperation

Canadian group that emphasizes focusing on what's gone well today and has a deck of cards that helps build empathy and moves conversations and relationships forward.

"Oblique Strategies" - deck of cards of ways to cooperate to move forward through a dilemma - originally concocted by Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno in 1975 for music composition work.

Roland's summary of our second live session about The Evolution of Cooperation.

[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis-this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

kin selection and it means the gene will spread.

In the pages that follow we advance two propositions. First, people cooperate not only for self-interested reasons but because they are genuinely concerned about the well being of others, care about social norms, and wish to act ethically. People punish those who exploit the cooperation of others for the same reasons. Contributing to the success of a joint project for the benefit of one's group, even at a personal cost, evokes feelings of satisfaction, pride, even elation. Failing to do so is often a source of shame or guilt. Second, we came to have these "moral sentiments" because our ancestors lived in environments, both natural and socially constructed, in which groups of individuals who are predisposed to cooperate and uphold ethical norms tended to survive and expand relative to other groups, thereby proliferating these pro-social motivations. The first proposition concerns proximate motivations for prosocial behavior, the second addresses the distant evolutionary origins and ongoing perpetuation of these cooperative dispositions.

Some of the biggest changes sweeping the technology world today are new forms of network and computer-enabled cooperation. It was easy enough to see this pattern in open source software development or Wikipedia, a bit more challenging to see how it powered Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon, but it gets really interesting when you are able to see how new kinds of man-machine symbiosis and networked cooperation are at the heart of projects like the Google self-driving car, the reinvention of retail by Apple and Square, transportation services from RelayRides to Uber, and even in new models for networked government.

Week 2, #COOPLIT Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, visits the RSA to investigate our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

Robert Axelrod Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan, AnnArbor. Dr. Axelrod is a member of the American National Academy of Sciencesand the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His honors include a MacArthurFoundation Fellowship for the period 1987 through 1992. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoistswithout central authority? This question has intrigued people for a longtime. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to lookafter themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperationdoes occur and that our civilization is based upon it

Jane Vella, the founder of Global Learning Partners, gained her insights on adult education from the thousands of participants she met over her 40 years of teaching in Africa, Asia and North America. Jane's academic research into the work of theorists Paulo Freire, Malcolm Knowles, Kurt Lewin, and Benjamin Bloom confirmed what she saw in the communities where she had worked:  that adults learn best through a "dialogue" that takes place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and safety, and with learning designs that are grounded in the reality of their lives.

90 minute video

« Sharing as accountabilityThe beauty of endless distractions in discussion forums » Minding mapping in the Social Media Classroom January 30, 2013 by jennymackness Mindmapping is a big feature of Howard Rheingold's course - Towards a Literacy of Cooperation. We are not only expected to collaboratively mindmap in the live sessions…. …… but also the first individual mission (task) requires the production of a mindmap.

Gardner Campbell (to the Open Education Conference in Vancouver in October last year) The Ecologies of Yearning - http://openedconference.org/2012/program/archive-of-sessions/day-1/day1-9am-c300/ The talk is not about cooperation or collaboration, but about 'opening' as a way of learning. He draws heavily on Gregory Bateson's 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' and his ideas about learning as a 'double bind' experience and transcontextual moments.

In his book "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World" Kevin Kelly has a chapter titled "Hive Mind."  Here is one of my favorite parts of that chapter: "For many years Mark Thompson, a beekeeper local to my area, had the bizarre urge to build a Live-In Hive -- an active bee home you could visit by inserting your head into it. He was working in a yard once when a beehive spewed a swarm of bees "like a flow of black lava, dissolving, then taking wing." The black cloud coalesced into a 20-foot-round black halo of 30,000 bees that hovered, UFO-like, six feet off the ground, exactly at eye level. The flickering insect halo began to drift slowly away, keeping a constant six feet above the earth. It was a Live-In Hive dream come true.

Teilhard developed a vision of evolution as an overarching comprehensive process encompassing cosmological, geological, biological, and cultural aspects. His genius lay in his ability to see unifying themes in processes which seem so different but which would be seen simply as differing degrees of a single process.

LIsa Tansey: I've read bit from from Tielhard de Chardin and tried to relate it to cooperation among learners. I wonder if there are any good documentaries of his work?