Joint presentation

“We have to talk for 20 minutes and leave 5 minutes for questions. So how shall we divide this up? Maybe I do the introduction and you do the rest?”

“How about you do the hard parts and I’ll do the easy bits?”

“Seriously now, look, you talk about his early upbringing, I’ll talk about his career as a lawyer and the ANC, then you talk about his arrest and apartheid in South Africa, and then I’ll finish off with his getting out of jail and becoming president and getting the Nobel.”

“I like this collaborative approach. Like a wiki.”

“Speaking of which, you know the organizer asked me who the author of that wikipedia article on Mandela was.”

“What did they need that for?”

“A reference list. One of those that goes, 1. author, 2. date of publication, 3. title, and 4. place of publication.”

“It’s a bit difficult to fit a wiki article into that frame.”

“Too darned right. Anyone can edit it. It’s a collaboration, so there’s no single author. It’s ongoing so there’s no fixed date of publication.”

“So wikis might change how bibliographies are written?”

“That’s micro. For macro think wikis could be a threat to intellectual property and copyright.

“Knowledge creation happens in social networks where people learn and teach each other.” Noel Tichy.

“The more you share, the more you win.” Brian Fetherstone.
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