Does Group IQ Trump Individual IQ?

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I've been ruminating about the BP oil spill and hope that, by the time you read this in September, we won't still be hearing about this disaster every day. Perhaps by then we will have realized that the effects of the oil spill go beyond the wildlife, the ecosystem, and the local economy. The BP oil spill is the latest in a series of disasters that include an unexpected pandemic that caught the international health community unprepared and a financial collapse that crippled economies and lives. We live in a volatile and uncertain world. This means that we have and will continue to have complex problems that demand unique solutions, sometimes beyond the scope of science, and most definitely allowing little room for error. How, then, do we address these problems? Consider Howard Gardner's hypothesis in Five Minds for the Future (2006): Creativity is no longer a human-or individual-centered enterprise, but the sum of the capacities of individual members. Gardner explores this idea from a cognitive and psychosocial perspective. But if you consider the values of the net generation, the preponderance of social media tools, and the flattening of the world, then we really do have to well with others. That means students will need to learn to work in diverse groups and to collaborate productively. We've seen how some businesses can be conducted efficiently by using social media tools and collaboration. By outsourcing jobs and using Internet-based tools, a business can spend far less money on workers and materials than if it used traditional methods. This is the future of how we will work. Teams of people, perhaps unknown to one another, will connect for a particular job. They'll need to trust one another to complete the job before finding another job, most likely with a whole new group. This kind of work has its roots in another concept, crowdsourcing--the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few (Howe 2006). Some would say that crowdsourcing is the perfect meritocracy. Seemingly, age, gender, ethnicity, educational background, and previous employment don't matter, but the quality of one's contribution to a group does. Crowdsourcing, James Surowiecki (2004) argues, can improve decisions by involving a group of people, rather than an individual. Crowd Wisdom and BP These concepts provide hope that collective knowledge and collaboration can help solve complex, intractable problems. Let's play this out with the BP oil spill. What if the solution to stopping the leak exists within the untapped resource of collective wisdom or crowdsourcing? Students at Tulane University, in conjunction with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and site host Radical Designs, uses technology from the Ushahidi Platform to visualize reports of the effects of the BP oil spill. Ushahidi was originally created as a web site that could map reports of violence in Kenya after the postelection violence in 2008. …