Introduction to Cooperation Studies (2)
In the first part of this series, I outlined the interdisciplinary study of human cooperation and linked to resources I developed on my own and with Institute for the Future. Now I will begin to introduce the fundamental ideas and source documents.
Starting in 2011, I started teaching an online course, Toward a Literacy of Cooperation, which I repeated eight times. The course syllabus includes an extensive list of texts, some of which were required for the course, many more of which were recommended. I prepared five lectures, starting with cooperative arrangements in biology, continuing with biological and cultural evolution of cooperation, social dilemmas, institutions for collective action, and technologies of cooperation. The lectures used slides, audio, video, and chat. My co-learners were active participants, text-chatting in parallel, asking questions and offering their own points, searching and contextualizing relevant links, identifying and defining words for a shared lexicon, creating a wiki page with the links and chat transcript.
These interactive lectures were recorded and can be replayed:
Introduction to the course and cooperative arrangements in biology
Biological and cultural evolution of cooperation
Institutions for collective action
Each interactive lecture was followed by a week of conversations and learning activities, using a forum, blogs, a wiki, mindmapping, and social bookmarking.
I made a concept map to show some of the relationships between these different disciplinary approaches.
In my next post I will introduce several key texts that illuminate the role of cooperative arrangements in biology.
Introduction to Cooperation Studies (3)