Let's collaborate.....

The article that we were assigned to read was entitled "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind" by Kenneth Bruffee. This article started out looking at the idea of whether or not we should have collaborative learning in the classroom yet it seemed to drift more into the philosophical and psychological views on the subject matter. The main idea of this article is to provide thoughts on whether knowledge for us as human beings is an innate gift which is born and bred in us or is it something that we attain from interacting with others? Kenneth's begins his argument with the idea of our thoughts in general and then from there he is able to develop and decide how we are able to attain knowledge.
Brufee's ideas on thought is that it is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. It sets us aside from the lower animals in the world because we have the gift of reason. This in fact is the only thing which provides us with the capacity for thought. If it was not for this then we would merely be animals with instincts and desires, but no reason to fuel those wants that we have. Reason is how we are able to think about what we do and how we are able to make the right decisions in our life. Our minds are able to evaluate what is right and wrong for us to do because we are able to perceive and interpret the world around us in a way that is different from other such animals. Brufee tells us that thought is inbred in us because of this capacity for reason. This is how we are able to come up with our own thoughts, this is not however how we are able to attain knowledge.
In his article Kenneth refers to knowledge as the product of a social interaction between humans. This is because we have the thoughts in our mind that we have come up with, about anything at all, but how are we supposed to be certain that these thoughts are correct unless we are able to collaborate and work with other people as well? He uses the example in the beginning of a doctor with a team of medical students who are attempting to diagnose a patient. Instead of having each student try to determine what is wrong with the patient one by one, the doctor tells them to work as a team and to pool their thoughts and diagnoses' together in order to attain a more proper and certainly faster diagnosis. This example i perfect for the topic of thought collaboration because that is precisely what the students have done. They put all of their thoughts together to form one idea which is more likely to be correct than if they each had their own thoughts. This is so because it is possible that each student has a different diagnosis but each student might also know more than the next, by therefore comparing their ideas together we are able to get a better picture of what is truly happening with the patient. This is the same in any common day example, all of us do not know everything and it is always possible to learn things from other people as well. Because of this it is necessary for us to work together and collaborate with one another in order to have a better understanding of the world around us.
Having a taken philosophy last semester and ethics this semester at Hofstra, this topic has been covered many times in my courses and everything that Kenneth Brufee says in this article is founded from a philosophical standpoint. I did not like the article because I personally hate philosophy classes, but I was able to understand it more having taken both of those classes already.