Steve Kinney

A few posts ago, I wrote about James Flynn and the Flynn effect as part of a much larger discussion on the way that we construct learning disabilities. I won’t repeat what I wrote in that post here, but I do want to highlight one aspect of Flynn’s thinking and see where it takes us.

Flynn hypothesizes that the popularization of the scientific method may have caused the consistent rise in IQ score over the last 50 years – and possibly longer, but that’s all the data we have. In short, we all tend to think a bit more like scientists than our great grand parents did. A large part of this includes our ability to organize information.

In What Is Intelligence?, Flynn uses an example from the original WISC assessment: “What do dogs and rabbits have in common?” Our grandparents most likely would have answered, “Dogs hunt [or chase] rabbits.” They would have looked at the relationship between the two in the real world. They wouldn’t have been wrong, but it’s not what an IQ test is looking for necessarily.

A more contemporary answer is “They are both mammals,” or “they both have fur.” With this answer, we are taking the two animals and organizing them into an abstract hierarchy. This answer is not any more or less right than the other answer (and may very well have a lot to do with the dwindling number of kids who go rabbit hunting), but it’s exactly the kind of thinking that an IQ test is designed to look for. It has to do with the way that we organize information.

Before computers – or before, computers were reliable – organizing information relied on a skilled use of the manila folder and an ingenious filing method. A document could only be filed in one folder. That folder could only be place in one cabinet. Sure, you could make multiple copies and file them under various headings, but this practice would most likely take decades off of your life resulting in your early demise from a brain aneurysm.

In the [insert cheesy moniker here – technology age, information age, knowledge industry], we have new ways of organizing information resulting in new ways of thinking.

One example is del.icio.us. With del.icio.us, I don’t file my bookmarks in one place as I might in Safari or Firefox. I tag the bookmark. If I were to tag this blog (which I highly recommend you do!), I might tag it as any of the following: blog, education, technology, teachers, edutech, worthlessbabbling, etc.

When digging through my del.icio.us bookmarks, I would find my blog under all of those headings. This blog employs both tactics. I file each entry in a category – this one is filed under “Musings.” But I can also tag it. This entry is tagged as “james flynn, flynn effect, iq, tagging, del.icio.us, and sorting.”

Tagging might seem relatively banal at first. However, once you’ve been doing it for a while, you’ll see an intricate web of thoughts and ideas begin to emerge. This increases exponentially when you consider that hundreds of thousands of people use del.icio.us and each person is using their best judgment to tag the same link. The result is a highly effective collective cognition approach to organization.

I believe that a lot of the changes in the way that we think and organize information as well as the emerging social aspect to organization is poised to spill over into the way we approach information in general. It will have a significant impact on our cognition and push the Flynn effect to the next level.

Scientific thinking boosted our IQ scores over the last 50 years. What about the next fifty years? The ability to classify concepts and ideas into an unlimited number of categories and the ability to connect these hierarchies socially will set the course for our cognitive development over the next 50.

For the curious, I’ve posted my delicious tag cloud. It’s interesting to see what you can tell about a person from their tag cloud.

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