Abstract:

Collective intelligence is an emerging field that already has a great impact in many areas and will have implications in educational, not only from the side of new methodologies but also as a change in the educational paradigm, currently centered on the student and not in the collectivity. Gregg (2009) referenced in Pérez_Gallardo (2013) states “There are many works that address the concept of collective intelligence, and they can be observed in many domains such as education”. Tsai et al., (2011) maintains that collective intelligence “can be used for both instructors and students to create education materials that can have great value. The collective intelligence of instructors, teaching assistants, and students can be used for creating and publishing subject area knowledge, instruction materials, instruction methods and tools, educational standards and curricula, assessment materials, and student performance assessment and for the evaluation of education materials.”

Scientific communication is in fact a discussion forum for the research community and plays a major role in the generation of knowledge and consequently providing progress to society. In this sense there have been published in diverse scientific journals a variety of papers related to the topic of collective intelligence and is currently taking momentum with the applications of internet technologies that allow a new scale in the collaboration between individuals.

The purpose of this study is to examine the evolution of Collective Intelligence in Education, and the research consists of a literature review used to perform a content analysis of publications on electronic search databases. The scientific papers considered are those published since 2010 till 2015 on the subject of collective intelligence. The content analysis is a methodology to analyze the papers that involves comparing, contrasting, and categorizing a set of information gathered using the papers as row material. The selection of papers was held in: EBSCO, ProQuest, SAGE, Science Direct, ACM, Web of Science, SpringerLink, Wiley. The search was limited to articles in journal, full-text, all language and all sciences. The key term used for the search included collective intelligence in education, the period considered was 2010-2015. The document search locates a total of 586 papers. The papers were selected following the approach of Zott et al., (2011). The content analysis strategy implemented to interpret the contents of the selected papers allowed the identification of a group of categories (Gómez 2000).

The study found that a significant part of collective intelligence research work was published in high-impact international journals and that it has been has used to address many different research questions using a diversity of technologies. The works analyzed show that collective intelligence can strengthen collaboration and competition while enriching interaction between individuals to acquire and share knowledge. In areas such as project based learning collective intelligence techniques may facilitate decision-making.

This collective intelligence literature review is a useful resource for all researchers entering this field and offers a scientific framework that may contribute in the design of future research.

Keywords:

Collective Intelligence, knowledge, technologies, education, pattern.