Essay Revision

Original Paragraph

This collective intelligence phenomenon produces results that benefit the whole group of individuals who contribute to it, yet this phenomenon is completely unintentional. In Davidson’s Project Classroom Makeover, the students at Duke University made iPod learning apps in order to receive free iPods from the university. Before Davidson knew it, the, “...iPods suddenly tripled and quadrupled in perceived value: Everyone wanted one” (Davidson 51). With this high value of the iPod, the students were highly motivated to do whatever they could to get their hands on one. What ultimately happened was that the iPod was transformed, “from a listening device into an interactive broadcasting device,” due to the students’ individual efforts to create learning apps to use in their classes. But, remember, this was not the goal of the experiment. The original goal of the experiment was to, “create a calculated exercise in disruption, distraction, and difference: a lesson in institutional unlearning…” (50). Even each student’s goal was not to create a technological revolution; they just wanted free iPods. It was as a result of these individual goals that the unintentional yet greater accomplishment of showing the potential of technology was able to bloom.


Revised Paragraph

The elimination of the fear of plagiarism or any sort of control on the development of ideas has the ability to revolutionize one of the most traditional systems in the world: the education system.. In Davidson’s Project Classroom Makeover, the students at Duke University made iPod learning apps in order to receive free iPods from the university. Before Davidson knew it, the, “...iPods suddenly tripled and quadrupled in perceived value: Everyone wanted one” (Davidson 51). With this high value of the iPod, the students were highly motivated to do whatever they could to get their hands on one. What ultimately happened was that the iPod was transformed, “from a listening device into an interactive broadcasting device,” due to the students’ individual efforts to create learning apps to use in their classes. When free to develop their own ideas, even if they are inspired by existing works, the students were able to accomplish a technological and educational revolution. The ability for the students at Duke to be able to accomplish this is illuminated by the role of a lack of hierarchy in the city of Manchester. The city, “...lay at the confluence of several world-historical rivers: the nascent industrial technologies of steam-powered looms; the banking system of commercial London; the global markets and labor pools of the British empire” (Johnson 196). Without any planners or a government, the city was free to be influenced by the most dominant economies and societies of the West at the time. As a result, “...Manchester attracted a steady stream of intellectuals and public figures...in search of the modern world’s future” (196). Manchester became the center of intellectuals in its prime without any limit on the influence of the environment on it. Such a concept should be applied to the education system in order to make it evolve as much as the city of Manchester did in a mere century-and-a-half.

The main change I made in this paragraph is, first, removing the parts that were basically summaries. Second, I added on a part that supported the first part of the paragraph with an example from Johnson's text, and then I related it to the idea of the fear of plagiarism from Lethem's text. The reason is that all of my paragraphs were originally simple summaries about how all the essays show an element of collective intelligence. In all of my paragraphs, I connected multiple essays to achieve a larger idea. I also had to change my thesis to reflect this change in argument.