Course Collaboration - Week 3

Our tutor directed our attention the other day to an observation of a colleague about the nature of initial contributions to a collaborative wiki?

She made the point that the first posting may be made with the intention of stimulating colleagues to build further, or with the intention of "marking out territory" as one's own, and that intending to discourage further colonisation. The former might be seen as more generally positive than the latter. Although "ownership" per se is not a bad thing in any collaboration, so the ideal is probably some balance.

I must admit that my initial fear was of people 'marking out territory' before I was ready to consider where I wanted to focus. At the same time, I recognized that as a bit of an irrational fear as two people could have very different perspectives on the same topic and would benefit by collaboration.

I have now made my mark on both the wiki and bubbl.us and I have had responses by A - who has been working on the wiki from the beginning. Also there have been a couple of others who are now writing in the wiki.  There are three others who are making 'their mark' in the wiki - so that is 5 out of 8 of us. A is looking hard at linkages and there are linkages between her interest in AI and mine in extended/augmented cognition.

I still feel I need to read more of a range of things - that I am not working hard enough. I am finding the unstructured nature of it -  not exactly hard but I am not motivated. I like the topic but I feel I am sluggish. I think I need more structure or more stimulation. It is very different from the other modules I have taken. I can see another course's  wiki and I can see how they have covered a lot of ground already.

Course collaboration - week 2

It is starting to get a bit unnerving as the discussion board has been rather quiet. We are all reading and exploring possible topic areas. By definition, that is solitary work. Only one person who has pretty clear ideas - at least about her broad topic area - has been posting regularly. One person has posted that she somehow missed the suggested initial readings and is now catching up on those. Interesting question, can reading only been done as a solitary activity? Is is possible to make it collaborative?

I have decided my broad topic area - extended cognition and augmented cognition. And I can see how this can be linked to AI - one topic area already identified by someone else. I have ordered several books but I think I may be reading too deeply, too soon. Perhaps a few short articles, videos etc may be more conducive to discussing these areas collaboratively.