2.2 Billion heads are better than one. Right?

Public Domain: Phó Nháy

I've been thinking about this post for a long time and trying to find just the right way to frame my ideas surrounding the concepts of collaboration, crowd-sourcing and hyperlinks.  After much deliberation, I've decided that I simply can't find it.  So, I'll free-associate this post.

Inarguably, collaborations are important for our students.  Collaboration is a core building block of the P21 Learning Framework.  Helping students learn how to effectively collaborate will continue to be one our biggest challenges moving forward in education.  Tools such as Google Docs, backchannels and Skype provide us with the means, but not necessarily the skill to do it.  That's up to us.

I believe that in controlled situations, with lots of guidance, collaboration helps our students.  I understand the importance of assisting these efforts and encouraging collaborative hyper-linking via sites such as diigo, pinterest and bolt.  However, the reality of today's hyper-linked society makes it difficult to discern the importance of links such as this one, and ones like this, or this.

How do we mitigate the importance of crowd sourcing (such as wikipedia, from which most of the links in the post have come, to prove a point) versus the possible deleterious effects of time-wasting and loss of focus?  Again, consider wikipedia and how I once spent over two hours clicking links starting with the desire to define the nebulous musical genre of "dubstep" and ended up on YouTube watching videos of Kool Herc pioneering the implementation of scratching.  Or, how a friend introduced the ever entertaining game that I'll call "How many links?"  Each player pushes the random page link on wikipedia.  Then each player tries to get from his or her page to the other person's page in the fewest number of links.  Hours of fun!  A total waste of time!

Once again, I'm coming back to a recurring theme of this blog.  21st century skills are not technology skills.  They are human skills that we need to use to help us effectively and efficiently use the technology that we have.  For example, Twitter can be a useful tool, but it's only useful if people are using it for good reasons.  Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga famously have over 1,000,000 followers, but are they contributing to the general good?  Am I?  I have twelve followers and I've never tweeted!  Join the conversation with @senorcoleman.