Hi my name is Caroline Elmets.  I recently changed my major to esociety and am so excited for ESOC 211.  I have enjoyed this class a lot so far and have learned things that I can incorporate into my daily life.  The main goal that each reading and TED talk are trying to get across is when people work together and collaborate their ideas, ultimately they will come up with a better solution rather than if they were to do it all by themselves.  In the reading Collective Intelligence it talks about how everyone has something that they are gifted with, and if we put all of our strengths together we can make things stronger and better as a whole.  Pierre Levy thinks that individuals in every day life should use collective intelligence, because it is people helping each other.  Social welfare comes into play in this article talking about the quality of life people want to live.  In the What is Collaboration Anyway reading it talks about how things are context based, and the three levels of collaboration.  These three levels of collaboration are weak, stronger, intense or strongest.  These steps must be met before collaboration can occur.  Collaboration requires shared goals that are intentional.  Social coordination is something that has to be marketed, after you have created something you need to share it with people so that they can see what you created because it is useless if people are not using it.  The TED talk was very informative for me, this was my favorite concept that I learned.  The man who was presenting the TED talk said something that stood out to me, and that was that intelligence requires independent thinking.  This stood out to me the most because often times during collaboration people end up letting their ideas get pushed to the side and end up agreeing with someone else's idea when often times they do not even agree with that idea.  When people do this and let other peoples ideas become their own it becomes damaging.  He is saying that yes it is good to collaborate ideas with groups because a group of peoples ideas is smarter than one single person.  But, these collaborations with large groups should be people giving their own opinion and ideas not molding into someone else idea because they think they need to.