Collective learning is faster

I read a Tumblr post recently, on how it’s more natural to view knowledge on a community level than an individual one, which made a lot of sense (it’s increasingly rare for us to need to recall knowledge in a vacuum, especially now we have mobile phones). In mathematical terms, it makes sense to define the knowledge of a community as the union of its individuals' knowledge (let’s ignore secrets and contradicting knowledge this time). But today I saw an example of how learning itself can happen on a collective level.

Normally in my community choir there are about 15 of us attending each week, and we can learn the pieces pretty fast. This week, due to an event that was happening at the same time, there were only 5 of us. Luckily, there was at least 1 person for each voice part (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), so we could keep learning as usual.

As a result of the small group size, we each got more personalised attention from the choir director. But surprisingly, we had to be taught for a lot longer in order to be able to sing a piece.

That’s because in choir, you are always singing while listening to the others in your part¹. Being amateurs, we don’t remember all the notes and words on our first try - but we tend to all remember different bits of the whole. So we sing the bits we remember, and for the rest just follow along with the rest of the group. With this support, we were able to learn from our fellow group members and memorise our parts quickly. Without it, each of us struggled alone to memorise them perfectly.

An example of something similar on a macro level would be when you discuss a topic or do homework with classmates. Despite going to the same classes, often each of you will have understood different things, and can support each other to quickly reach the level of the group. Alone, you would have needed to spend longer plugging all the gaps in your understanding.

Is that because your classmate is better at explaining the topic than your teacher? Probably not. Instead, the difference is that you and your classmate can have a direct conversation, which is usually more effective than stand-up teaching, especially when a student is struggling. Your teacher doesn’t have time to talk directly with every student; the group discussion distributes a much heavier burden (direct conversations with all students) over a larger number of people (those same students).

So, not only is the knowledge of a community roughly the union of the knowledge within it, the learning speed of a community is also greater than its individuals'. It would seem to increase along with the “noisiness” or “diversity” of learning - the tendency for people to learn different things - combined with their tendency to collaborate and exchange knowledge.

I wonder how this could be applied to maximise teaching resources. Perhaps we should teach concepts faster, or teach subsets of students different concepts, and then ask them to share what they learned with each other. People do say that the best way to learn something is by teaching it, after all.