Collaboration

Austin is sitting in a chair with the audience while presenting his PowerPoint presentation.

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Austin: One of the underlying principles in concept mapping is that the learner can see visually relationships between elements of what he or she is learning.

Herman: Such as logical connections like cause and effect, subordination giving examples, and so on?

Austin: Exactly. This enables us go outside a top-down approach, to escape from two dimensional modeling and enter into three dimensional, collaborative representations.

Herman: So this is why you leave the chair empty and give your presentation from within the audience instead of from the front of the room? To enhance the atmosphere of collaboration?

Austin. Precisely. But it also allows me to avoid neckstrain caused by constantly swinging between the screen and the audience. This way I’m much more relaxed.

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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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