Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
Thousands of Moscow teachers are forming virtual “digital flocks” and don’t even know it. Educator and researcher Evgeny Patarakin reveals this phenomenon in his new monographs. The book was published by the Moscow State Pedagogical University. The author created it together with students of the course “Building online communities“, which takes place at the base Institute of Education HSE. They found that in the age of digital platforms, educational materials are no longer born in the offices of individuals. Now knowledge emerges thanks to the collective creativity of people who may never meet in person.
Let’s imagine a football field where the ball is passed from player to player. Every touch is a digital trace, every pass is a connection between people. This is how modern educational platforms work: a document or lesson plan becomes the ball that unites teachers from different schools.
“We found that 75% of teachers copying each other’s projects form a single community – a giant component,” notes Patarakin, who studied digital traces at the Moscow Electronic School (MES).
Digital analysis has revealed a surprising picture: teachers who have never met in person form invisible but strong bonds. When a mathematician from Bibirevo downloads a presentation created by a historian from Kuzminki and then refines it, they become part of the same team without even realizing it.
In science, such communities of experts linked by common interests rather than formal affiliation with an organization are called “invisible colleges.” The term dates back to the 17th century and refers to informal associations of scientists.
“It’s like a complex, self-organizing system where each participant acts according to their own rules, but together they create something bigger,” Patarakin explains. In his research, he found that teachers in the digital space form “digital flocks” of sorts — groups that act in concert, although their members may not even be aware of each other’s existence.
To understand the mechanisms of this phenomenon, the researcher developed several virtual “sandboxes” using the programming languages Scratch, Snap! and others. In these models, digital characters, following elementary algorithms, create complex structures that are strikingly reminiscent of real educational communities.
The researcher built a virtual world with digital teachers and lesson scenarios. It turned out to be something like a computer game, where instead of fantasy heroes there are teachers, and instead of artifacts there are educational materials. In this model, it is possible to configure how accessible the materials are for different teachers: for example, whether they only see scenarios for their subject or can discover the developments of colleagues from other disciplines.
These computer models have serious practical implications. They help create educational platforms where knowledge is shared more effectively and teachers can find and improve each other’s materials more quickly. In such a world, the collective intelligence of thousands of educators surpasses the capabilities of even the most brilliant individual experts.
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