Encouraging Collaboration
October 30, 2007 – 9:01 amI’ve been meeting four new grad students (Samira, Jeremy, Carolyn, and Jon) on Monday mornings this term. Initially, the point was to pick apart some research papers: what good ideas do they contain, what are the strengths and flaws in their presentation, etc. For next week, though, I’ve set them a different goal: each of them is to come up with one thesis idea for each of the others. The point is partly to get them thinking about research topics—under the new rules, they’re supposed to finish in a total of 17 months, which will fly by pretty fast—but what I really want is for them to get used to bouncing ideas off one another. Our educational system discourages this: when students in my classes talk in detail about their work to anyone except their officially-assigned partners, we call it plagiarism, and take off marks. It’s a hard habit to break; I’ll be interested to see whether the academic equivalent of picking an outfit for someone else will do it.
And of course, given David Crow’s comments about last night’s DemoCamp, I’m wondering whether this can be generalized and scaled up in some way (assuming, of course, that it works…)
2 Responses to “Encouraging Collaboration”
I think it was James Bach (but it might have been Michael Bolton) who told me that it is a professional requirement of doing my job the best I can to steal as many ideas as I possibly can and incorporate them into my own testing activities. In my ‘Testing Project’ course, students have to put everything they do on a wiki which all course members can see. That way there is a forced cross-pollination of ideas. Assignments are to be posted weekly, but they are not marked until the end to allow for tweaks / re-writes depending on the new information seen / discovered from others.
-adam
By adam on Oct 30, 2007
Much of what we think of as innovation is really just the tension between differing viewpoints.
You really need to be open to criticism and feedback. You need to share. You need to remix. You need to build upon and evolve.
If you think you need an NDA for a coffee because you think I’m going to be able to steal your idea in 15 minutes, you’re wrong. If I can steal the idea in 15 minutes or less, it’s not a great idea. And by the way, don’t forget about executing!
This is great Greg. If it helps, I’ll come share all of the stuff that I’m thinking about and working on.
By David Crow on Nov 3, 2007