Knowledge Building / Collective Learning

http://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/Files/Courses_Folder/ED%20261%20Papers/Scardamalia%20Knowledge%20Building.pdf

• "Knowledge building environments enable ideas to get out into the world and onto a path of continual improvement. This means not only preserving them but making them available to the whole community in a form that allows them to be discussed, interconnected, revised, and superseded." 
• CSILE/Knowledge Forum

Big History Project on Human Collective Learning:  https://www.bighistoryproject.com/en/thresholds/6

• "Humans are unusual. We walk upright and build cities. We travel between continents in hours and can communicate across the globe. We can build bombs and invent medicines. Why can we do all these things that other creatures can't do? The answer is in our ability to learn collectively."
• Yanonmami arrow-making:  "If you were to do it on your own, you could spend much of your life learning to make an arrow but you wouldn't make one nearly as good or effective as this one. That is because this arrow is the culmination of generations of skill and knowledge, a product of human intelligence and collective learning – like learning to live in the Amazonian forest itself, with its thousands of species of plants and animals that have proved useful for survival. Watch a tribal elder make an arrow, and you won't call him “primitive.”
• "New ways to convey ideas and communicate plans all feed into a community's collective learning, which means that people can work together to find new and better ways to live. But collective learning is affected by factors that can limit or accelerate its impact. Knowledge sharing has its own form of network effects, where the quantity and diversity of ideas exchanged influence the overall network. Over time, the Yanomami mastered the art of the arrow and increased their encyclopedic knowledge of the jungle. But being so reclusive for so long, with environmental and cultural limitations on the ways in which they connected with different ways of thinking, they did not follow the same path that led other groups to agriculture, and the new innovations that came with it."
• But there are other species that use tools and other species with large brains. It is collective learning [human knowledge that builds up from generation to generation, becoming super powerful], the ability to share, store, and build upon information that truly distinguishes humans.
• This ability to learn collectively and to keep accumulating information from generation to generation is powerful and unique to humans