I had some busy days covering the European debt crisis for my newspaper De Tijd and trying to keep up work for my online courses. I had to focus on the Toward a literacy of Cooperation course, facilitated by Howard Rheingold, as the course itself is now in its last days and we, the students, had to cooperate to create to last session, ‘The Big Picture’.
Somehow my experiences liveblogging the G20 in Cannes, France and the Cooperation course got linked together.
– As I was liveblogging the G20 (I was in Antwerp, Belgium, and my fellow journalist Peter De Groote was in Cannes), we made a very intense use of Twitter. It was remarkable how Twitter, as experienced through my list of financial journalists and commentators, became like an augmented, open, international newsroom.
Journalists in Athens provided a realtime translation of the debate in the Greek parliament, other colleagues in Cannes translated, commented and analyzed what was going at the G20 itself. They were reaching out to each other, on the ground and on Twitter, regardless of nationalities or commercial interests. I think the readers of the liveblog somehow sensed that what they were reading was a curated collection of human voices, with all the seriousness, drama and humour involved.
– While the spontaneous virtual newsroom emerged, one could ask whether our beloved world leaders are very knowledgeable in the practice and the ethos of social media. Just wondering whether there is something like a wiki for world leaders, where they can brainstorm, exchange references and ideas. The G20 wanted to discuss new ideas for a new world, but instead it was all about solving the problems of the eurozone. I have no doubt it is crucially important for world leaders to meet each other at such summits, but I can only hope they also cooperate using some kind of secret wiki, forums, blogs and mindmaps. But somehow I doubt they actually use that stuff. Maybe the dominant model of competing nation-states is not compatible with online social tools? But then again, maybe cooperation is at least as important as competition…
РWhich brings me to the Toward a Literacy of Cooperation Course. One of the many discussion topics is the application of the principles for the governance of common pool recources (cfr Elinor Ostrom) on online communities. Another one is about collective intelligence. One of the leading thinkers about collective intelligence is the French scholar Pierre L̩vy. Howard Rheingold had this video interview with L̩vy:
Watching this, I had some other questions. Not only whether world leaders do use or do not use social media tools, whether or not in a confidential settings. There is an even more serious issue: do they have the framework and lenses necessary to even see the importance of the amplification of collective intelligence? Because this amplification brings along opportunities and challenges and makes paradigms shift. It demands new literacies – do our education systems provide those literacies? Do those systems change themselves fundamentally so as to be relevant in a post-industrial society? Do they understand that even the notion of “learning” itself might be changing, as is discussed in the MOOC Change11?
I have my doubts. And the disconnect between the formats for cooperation on the level of our world leaders and the disruptive changes caused by globalization, networks, and the amplification of collective intelligence will lead to even more upheaval.
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