Consilience was, I think, revived by E. O. Wilson’s book of the same name a few years ago. I enjoyed it a great deal, enough that my first book (authored with Ike Chuang) opens with a quote from Consilience.

I’ve found your blog recently while generally searching for more perspectives on scientific publication…a ref librarian friend and I sent several blog posts from a few different sites as a form of “discussion”. As a result, I’ll begin incorporating many of your posts into an advanced undergrad class I teach — I’m very much looking forward to discussing the changing publication landscape with those who will be likely participants! I’m also going to structure their experience with some of the sharing platforms to see if “ambient intimacy” as a concept has an analogue in “ambient literacy” — it ought to be fun!

An interesting application of “collective intelligence” is the SWoRD program out of of the University of Pittsburgh — http://sword.lrdc.pitt.edu/aboutsword.aspx
I haven’t tried it in classes yet b/c of the time required, but seems like an interesting statement regarding the power of collaborative input compared to the individual comment of an expert.

The SWoRD home page is under construction, with plans apparently to re-emerge as “consilience” — a concept I remember reading at an airport bookstore many years ago:), but only have a vague recollection of meaning something to do with collective knowledge. I wonder about the change of name since consilience as a topic then didn’t seem to take off. Still, I’ve read the studies the Pitt team has done, and the conclusions are provocative, especially since “peer review” at the undergrad level is usually unproductive, even as a training into the concept at higher levels.

Mickey