Atlee, Theories of Co-Intelligence

This post is a summary of some of Thomas Atlee’s key ideas about co-intelligence. The Co-Intelligence Institute (www.co-intelligence.org), the foundation he founded and directs, has a website that contains numerous articles and links to resources and scholarship on co-intelligence.

Co-intelligence is an attitude that a person or a group can orient themselves to in order to draw on the diverse experiences, intelligences, and wisdoms of others in order to better solve problems. It requires that those involved in the group embrace and understand diversity as an asset in order to build a more holistic, dynamic intelligence. Those involved in co-intelligent initiatives and projects work consciously and deliberately to build and construct systems that encourage the development of co-intelligence among members, creating sustainable, organized systems that highlight the interconnectedness and relationships between people and ideas. Co-intelligence is intelligence “with”: with others, with systems, with a group, between groups and communities.

Atlee’s theories are used by scholars in design, ecology, philosophy, political science and governance, and organizational theory. Atlee argues that participation in co-intelligence – as opposed to what he terms “alienated individualism” – benefits the individual, the group, and society as a whole. When people work synergistically with others, they keep the big picture in mind, benefiting all.

Atlee presents two aspects of co-intelligence: collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence. Collective intelligence is drawing on the inclusive collective knowledge of a group (as opposed to one person’s individual intelligence) to better, more wisely solve problems. Atlee gives examples of how different levels of groups and communities, from small and large groups to whole states and countries, have used collective intelligence successfully. Collaborative intelligence is the spirit in which a group or person can engage in co-intelligence: working for the benefit of all instead of to dominate or oppress. This can happen through an open economy of sharing information.

Quotable Quotes

“This ability to wisely organize our lives together — all of us being wiser together than any of us could be alone — we call co-intelligence. In its broadest sense, co-intelligence involves accessing the wisdom of the whole on behalf of the whole.”

From “A Compact Vision of Co-intelligence”
“attention to collective intelligence is a key ingredient missing from most civic and political undertakings.” How about our scholarly undertakings?

“A major challenge in all collaboration is the creative use of diversity. One form of diversity is, interestingly enough, different cognitive styles or what some call multiple intelligences. Within and among us, we find analytical intelligence and emotional intelligence, verbal intelligence and musical intelligence, kinesthetic bodily intelligence and transcendental intelligence, and many more. How do analytical, intuitive and kinesthetically-oriented people apply their diverse intelligences collaboratively to generate a more powerful, complete collective intelligence?”

From “Ten Qualities of Co-intelligence”
“Co-intelligence is multi-dimensional, inclusive, wise, responsive, grounded in interconnectedness, synergistic, collaborative, self-aware, holistic and systemic, manifesting at many levels of human activity.”

“We build, invite and utilize partnerships to accomplish our goals. We seek interactivity to generate energy — and dialogue to generate wisdom. We value, above all, conscious, intentional co-operation and co-creativity. We are practicing the co-intelligent art of collaboration.”

“We arrange our lives and relationships, groups and organizations, communities and cultures so as to support these co-intelligent qualities. We know that the design of environments, relationships and processes influences consciousness, and that consciousness influences design. We are being mindful of the systemic nature of co-intelligence that manifests at many levels of human activity and reality.”

Notable Notes

The Tao of Democracy (Atlee 2003)

McClure and Baures, Looking In by Looking Out

McClure, Randall and Lisa Baures. “Looking In by Looking Out.” Computers and Compositon. (Fall 2007).

McClure, a WPA, and Baures, a librarian, argue for greater collaboration between librarians and compositionists to revise first-year composition curriculum to better serve the information literacy needs students have in today’s digital world. They illustrate their collaborative method for curriculum revision in this article, the triangulation of WPA standards, ACRL standards, and institutional individual course objectives. They argue that librarians and compositionists have similiar literacy concerns and challenges when working with students, and a rich collaboration with library and information science can enrich the content of the first-year composition course.

Quotable Quotes

“Therefore, to better understand the complexities of information literacy and provide instructional strategies to help students develop information literacy skills, composition might once again be served by exploring other fields, in this case the field of Library and Information Science. This field not only acknowledges the complexity of researching in the digital age and crafts a whole series of standards for information literacy, but it also give teachers something they often search for—content for composition.  ” (emphasis mine)

“the disconnection between “college-eligible and college ready” must be addressed, but it cannot be done by correlating high school and college level standards, irrespective of whether they are information literacy or subject content standards. Nor can systemic needs for remediation be ignored. Yet in the absence of a viable solution to this problem, librarians and writing composition instructors must design and develop curricula to provide students with the basic research and writing skills to succeed academically.”

Notable Notes

Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)

new need: how to evaluate, analyze, synthesize sources. Learning how to use and analyze sources will make students better researchers and writers.

Kolko, Intellectual Property in Synchronous and Collaborative Virtual Space

Kolko, Beth E. “Intellectual Property in Synchronous and Collaborative Virtual Space.” Computers and Composition 15 (1998): 163-183.

Kolko discusses the challenges of citing conversations from MOOs (like chat rooms.) These conversations are inherently responsive and recursive (making it impossible to pull one comment out of context), sit on the border between the private and the public (making it questionable whether the person is publishing their words to the whole world, and thus whether or not you can use it), are a hybrid of writing and speaking (also making it difficult to know how and if to cite this material), and have no stable author (use of pseudonyms.) Kolko tries to define how to cite MOOs (which she does in her paper) and what can be used for research through the framework of copyright law, but then, at the end  of her piece, argues that we need to stop using copyright law to determine how we treat these sources, instead looking at the nature of digital MOO collaborative conversations first.

Quotable Quotes

“Definitions of ownership and property fracture when we rethink the relationship of an individual contribution to a larger social space” (164).

Notable Notes

conflation of copyright and plagiarism. Asks two questions: 1. how do we assign rights/ownership to digital Internet conversations (often anonymous/pseudonymous) and 2. how do we cite these conversations – can we?

internet researchers don’t have to go through the same loops as in-person researchers, they can stalk these MOOs and pull off comments and conversations like a fly on the wall, not having to go through all the work

what kind of space is the MOO?

uses feminist theory to talk about the blurring of private and public spaces, collaborative ownership and authorship

Howard, Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty.” College English 57.7 (Nov 1995): 788-806.

University regulations and policy statements on plagiarism need to be revised to reflect the field’s complex understandings of authorship, composing, and plagiarism. These policy statements, which try to simplify and stabilize the dynamic, complex concept of plagiarism, are problematic because they uphold the Romantic ideal of the single, solitary author, they couch plagiarism solely on moral (not pedagogical) terms, and they define plagiarism through textual features without any consideration for a writer’s intent or context. Howard includes a sample plagiarism policy that she wrote that more accurately reflects the continuum of motivations and practices of plagiarisms, with a range of appropriate responses for patchwriting, failure to cite, and outright cheating and plagiarism.

Quotable Quotes

“The cumulative, interactive nature of writing that makes impossible the representation of a stable category of authorship and hence a stable category of plagiarism” (791).

“Sanctioning rather that criminalizing an important stage of students’ learning processes” (802).

Notable Notes

two sources to look at: Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words – treats plagiarism through lens of solitary author – and Hull, Glynda and Mike Rose. “Rethinking Remediation: Toward a Social-Cognitive Understanding of Problematic Reading and Writing.” Written Communication 6.2 (1989): 139-154. – argues for imitation in comp pedagogy

why is plagiarism so offensive? It undermines what we believe in composition – that writing is discovery, expressionism, an understanding of the self

moral lens so that universities have to prosecute plagiarism: theft, integrity, secrets, crime, honor, citizenship

university policies don’t line up with current understandings and theories of authorship – collaborative, digital

Woodmansee and Jaszi, The Law of Texts

Woodmansee, Martha and Peter Jaszi. “The Law of Texts: Copyright in the Academy.” College English 57.7 (Nov 1995): 767-787.

Woodmansee and Jaszi show how the history of modern copyright is aligned with 19th century literary theory that privileges the solitary autonomous author, a theory that is currently outdated. Even though this theoretical foundation has shifted, copyright has not shifted with it, instead becoming even more restrictive. They argue that compositionists need to take the lead on framing and arguing for balance in copyright protection through 1. taking public stances on educational fair use and the extension of copyright protections and 2. changing their pedagogy from one that depends on the solitary author to one that teaches students about the collaborative, social nature of composing.

Quotable Quotes

“What is needed, in short, is an ethos of collaboration which would encourage students to acknowledge their debts, and a corresponding rhetoric of attribution to help them identify and name these debts – in place of the punitive rhetoric that is typically found in the chapter devoted to the research paper in our current composition textbooks and handbooks” (784).

“The intellectual commons on which we may draw freely as writers and readers, scholars and teachers, is shrinking fast” (772).

“The enclosure of the public domain” (772).

fear of “worldwide uncontrolled piracy” (from “Controlling Electronic Rights” Rights 6.2 (1992): 3-4.)

Notable Notes

extending copyright and restricting fair use – Kinkos photocopying case (does not recognize authorship as arranging and selection, Romantic understanding of the author); absolute 1st publication right restricts the use of unpublished materials

academic writers don’t need the protection of copyright for financial reasons, they write books for status, tenure, not direct profit, so they can turn to copyleft protection

Murray, Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement

Murray, Laura J. “Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement: The Costs of Confusion.” In Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism. Eds. Eisner and Vicinus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. 173-182.

Students need to know that there is a difference betweeen copyright infringement and plagiarism, and Murray advocates teaching them about citation systems (academic and otherwise), which places the focus on respect and collaboration instead of punishment and fear. Murray delineates between permission (copyright, market systems) and acknowledgement (citation systems), explaining that plagiarism is not an absence of permission but rather a neglect to acknowledge (purposeful or not.) People regularly use citation in speaking and writing, as it builds networks and credibility. Murray agues that the freedom to use and copy others’ ideas is not (and should not be seen) as an exception to copyright law for that freedom forms the foundation of the academic, intellectual endeavor.

Quotable Quotes

“I would suggest that citation acts as a powerful reminder of the collaborative and collective nature of knowledge” (176).

“It is normal to cite: it is part of the social fabric and habitual modes of speech” (178).

Notable Notes

citation covers everything, no matter how old – copyright runs out

Simon Fraser University example – problem with placing financial burden of requiring copyright permission by students for their papers when citation should be sufficient.

Howard, Standing in the Shadow of Giants

Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1999.

Howard advances a new theory of authorship that contests current understandings of plagiarism and the construction of the student-plagiarist-criminal. Patchwriting, a term she coins for writer-text collaboration (likened to imitation, mimesis, re(formation)), is not a cheating behavior that should be punished and labeled as plagiarism. Rather, it is a necessary and acceptable way of learning, a method used and endorsed throughout history as a way for novices to learn the langauge needed to enter a discourse community. Students who patchwrite in their essays and papers with the intent of understanding difficult texts, of learning, not deceit, and are doing something all writers do – collaborate with texts – except that these novice students aren’t as adept at covering their traces as professional authors are. Her theory of authorship stands in opposition to the notion of the autonomous, original author and seeks to disrupt the liberal cultural hierarchy that maintains the current power structure that has an interest in keeping students, the masses, from finding a voice. Howard argues for a pedagogy based in summary-writing as a way to teach students what patchwriting is (and to use it towards pedagogical good) and ends the book by calling for a revision of current college plagiarism policies.

Quotable Quotes

definition of patchwriting = “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another” (xvii)

“The inclusion of patchwriting in the category of plagiarism denies students opportunities to become scholars” (xx)

“The prospect of decriminalizing patchwriting causes seismic disturbances in composition studies” (xx).

“We do not write alone, and often it is texts, not people, with whom we collaborate” (8).

Patchwriting is “a discursive operation not against the source author but toward the content in which the operation occurs” (19).

Need to teach students “how to manage their patchwriting in ways that are stylistically sophisticated and academically acceptable and that contribute to the writer’s understanding of the source text” (140)

“Let ‘patchwriting’ describe the act of enthusiasm in which students collaborate with their source texts for the purposes of understanding them and entering their discourse. Let us respond pedagogically to that phenomenon” (166).

Notable Notes

four properties of authorship: autonomy, proprietorship, originality, morality (77)

move from neutral mimesis/originality binary to a hierarchal plagiarist/author binary

do not conflate plagiarism and copyright. Copyright is state regulated, legal norms to protect the individual author. Plagiarism rules are locally regulated, societal norms to protect a community….you can change plagiarism rules without changing copyright law

there is allowable plagiarism – ghost-writing, Teflon, great-wit, postmodern (104) also traditions of African American folk preaching, non-Western education and rhetoric, digital hypertext

long list of theorists, philosophies: Locke, Descartes, Hobbes, Foucault, Addison, Emerson, Wordsworth, Edward Young, Bahktin, Quintilian, Plato, Homer

plagiarism dectection software: “This technology would freeze and reassert the notion of authorship in which writing is unitary, originary, proprietary, and linear, and in which the text is the locus and sole arbiter of meaning” – not allow for meaning in context, in the reader, in the author’s intent (131)

patchwriting has a ton to do with reading comprehension (cognitivist) and entering an intellectual community (social constructivist) (145)

Her breakdown: plagiarism – act of intention for deceit (buying a paper, on-purpose-cheating); failure to cite – failing to cite out of ignorance of academic citation conventions; patchwriting – a transitional stage

both failure to cite and patchwriting are pedagogical opportunities, not occassions to terrorize and punish students.

trying to rid patchwriting from students is asking them to be less complex, polyphonus, and honest & true

Bowden, Coming to Terms

Bowden, Darsie. “Coming to Terms: Plagiarism.” The English Journal 85:4 (April 1996), 82-84.

In order to understand plagiarism, you must address and study the value systems that define it. This overview of current conversations about plagiarism explains the Latin origin of plagiarism (a person who owns slaves, a master) and shows how plagiarism is a decidedly Western phenomenon, drawing on the the three major problems with plagiarism, all grounded in Western thought and ideology: it disrespects a teacher and an institution, it breaches an ethical academic integrity code, and breaches culture’s adherence to the concept of original thinking. Different cultures have different beliefs about who can own language, thus allowing for the kinds of collaboration that are taboo in Western institutions.

Notable Notes

no real argument, just a kind of “here we are” account of plagiarism in education

Elbow and Belanoff, Portfolios as a Substitute for Proficiency Exams

Elbow, Peter and Pat Belanoff. “Portfolios as a Substitute for Proficiency Exams.” CCC 37 (1986): 336-339. In Assessing Writing. Eds. Huot and O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 97-101.

Elbow and Belanoff describe the process and the benefits of the portfolio evaluation system they piloted at Stony Brook University. Instead of focusing on scoring and ranking essays, the portfolio system they put in place, which is a pass/fail (C or not) from the student’s teacher and another instructor, is mastery- and competency-based. The focus of the assessment and the course turns to comments, feedback, advice, and revision as well as collaboration among teachers. Students see the portfolio assessment (which has a dry run mid-semester) as a hurdle to overcome. Elbow and Belanoff argue that even though the assessment process leads to much debate among teachers during the assessment, this disagreement and chaos is key to learning and the development of community standards and values.

Mortensen and Kirsch, On Authority in the Study of Writing

Mortensen, Peter and Gisa E. Kirsch. “On Authority in the Study of Writing.” CCC 44.4 (Dec 1993) 556-572.

Reimagining authority as informed by an “ethic of care” creates a new, more dialogic form of authority than the authoritarian, autonomous model of authority that divorces authority from a contextual, material reality. Mortensen and Kirsch use a feminist framework to conceive of their alternate authority, showing how authority established through dialogue, connectedness, and collaboration in context can transform how we teach students about the kinds of authority they might construct in their writing and the kinds of authority they might encounter and enact. Mortensen and Kirsch do not reject a notion of authority, pointing out that sometimes, it serves both the teacher and the student for the teacher to take a more authoritative stance in the classroom, arguing that exercising authority (when that authority is informed by an ethics of care – a responsibility to your obligations as a teacher) is not coercion. Ultimately, Mortensen and Kirsch hope to open up ways to compose academic arguements without resorting to traditional automonous, partriarchal authority, allowing for academic discourse that is more collaborative, dialogic, and exploratory.

Quotable Quotes

“Unlike authority, care can never be fully autonomous…care inheres in relations between people and, therefore, assumes community as its first domain” (565).

We need to “shape what authority does rather than simply attempting to alter what it is.” (566).

Notable Notes

breaks down two views of authority: that you gain it through assimiliation to the standards and conventions of a discourse community; that it is inherently bad, uncritical, and repressive

authority as gendered

there is no independent, autonomous authority. It is always in context.

autonomous authority even surfaces in process pedagogy – the writer’s voice is introspective and autonomous. Even with the social turn – authority was foundational, part of the community, something to assimilate to, not constantly negotiated and emerging.

Giroux Schooling