Our goal with this Blog is to raise ideas and attempt to resolve issues associated with thinking and learning collaboratively in a purposeful community of inquiry.

I would like to initiate this Blog with a discussion on the topic of confirmation bias. This topic was the focus of a recent article that speaks to the core strength and reason for a community of inquiry approach. To this point, the article by Beran et al. (2015) explores the pressure to conform to the group in a way that is a "barrier to effective communication and learning" (p. 63).

The core message of this longitudinal study for me is that there is risk for conformity in collaborative online learning due to attachment and identification within the group. This is obviously relevant in the current environment of fake news and where individuals are increasingly trapped in their selected bubble. I explored this issue of conformity in some depth in a recent book titled Thinking Collaboratively (Garrison, 2016) that focused on the cognitive dimensions of thinking and learning in a community of inquiry. The central theme of this book was the idea of confirmation bias that addresses the human tendency to confirm previously held ideas and a resistance to consider alternative perspectives. I argued that paradoxically, thinking is not an individual private experience. Thinking and learning without critical feedback and diagnosis of misconceptions is to simply confirm existing beliefs. The constructive alternative is to recognize our fallibility when it comes to understanding complex subjects and situations. The most effective solution to the cognitive straightjacket of confirmation bias is to think and learn collaboratively.

Collaboration is an inherent human characteristic and central to human intelligence and evolution. While the human instinct is to collaborate, we as educators must be conscious of the pressure to conform and engage in group think; to avoid what my colleague Walter Archer termed "pathological politeness." In this regard, recent attention has been focused on the risks of accessing information from social media which risks reinforcing existing viewpoints. This has been referred to as a "collective social bubble" where like-minded individuals are insulated from contrary opinions and diversity of thought. They become trapped in their ideological bubble and become isolated in a tribalistic echo chamber.

In this age of connectivity we very much need approaches that encourage critical and creative thinking by being exposed to a variety of information sources which stimulate personal reflection and shared discourse. We must do all we can to search for truth through collaborative inquiry while being vigilant to the degradation of fact. As we have seen in the recent US election and the influence of fake news there is a pressing need to develop a good BS detector and be relentlessly skeptical. Less than credible media are proliferating on the web and we have to develop abilities to think critically while being flooded by questionable information presented as facts.

The human tendency is to decide things emotionally and not rationally. Collaborative inquiry is crucial to challenge questionable intuitive responses and encourage diversity of thought in our quest for shared understanding and knowledge. This requires a special set of conditions we have described as a community of inquiry (Garrison, 2017). Ironically my bubble and confirmation bias is the power of the CoI framework to address the need to think and learn critically and creatively in a world being dominated by social media. Your comments are most welcomed to free me from my ideological bubble.