Showing 33 posts tagged collaboration
“We live in a world where people can talk back to their books,” Mr. Duncombe told me.”
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Yet this incessant teamwork isn’t useful. A mountain of studies has shown that face-to-face brainstorming and teamwork often lead to inferior decisionmaking. That’s because social dynamics lead groups astray; they coalesce around the loudest extrovert’s most confidently asserted idea, no matter how daft it might be.
What works better? “Virtual” collaboration—with team members cogitating on solutions alone, in private, before getting together to talk them over. As Cain discovered, researchers have found that groups working in this fashion generate better ideas and solve problems more adroitly. To really get the best out of people, have them work alone first, then network later.
Sounds like the way people collaborate on the Internet, doesn’t it?
”(via ninakix)
“CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.”
(via smarterplanet)
“Under the plan, which begins today, all Michigan faculty will be eligible for a $20,000 credit that can be redeemed only if they work with two other faculty members, including one outside their academic field.”
(via psutlt)
5 Private Liberal-Arts Colleges Will Share a Professor
Five private liberal-arts colleges—four in West Virginia and one in Virginia—will share a remedial-mathematics professor, and two of them will share an American-history professor, in an effort to trim costs while maintaining a high quality of instruction, reports The Charleston Gazette.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
“What Mazur has found over nearly 20 years of using peer instruction is that many more students choose the right answer after they have talked with their peers. And it’s not because they’re blindly following their neighbor’s lead. By the end of the semester, students have a deeper understanding of the fundamental concepts of physics than they did when Mazur was just lecturing. Students end up understanding nearly three times as much now, measured by a widely-used conceptual test. In addition to having a deeper grasp of concepts, students in Mazur’s classes are better at solving conventional physics problems, despite the fact that Mazur no longer spends class time at the board doing problems. He says this shows something that may seem obvious. “If you understand the material better, you do better on problem-solving,” Mazur says. “Even if there’s less of it done in class.”
Stone Age Social Networks May Have Resembled Ours
If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That’s right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.
» via Wired
Office Mix Up
The lack of interaction among excellent scholars with similar interests raises some organizational questions with important implications: Why cluster faculty members into departmental ghettos any longer? Why not allow voluntary mixing and matching — especially in cognate disciplines? Electronic communications via departmental listservs can provide the unit-specific information needed to keep the trains running on time, and the idea of promoting casual, often spontaneous interaction among scholars with similar research interests, but different methods is at once liberating and exhilarating.
Moreover, because scholars from different disciplines possess different strengths and different forms of proprietary knowledge, chances for the kind of intellectual arbitrage and cross-disciplinary collaborations that make for innovative breakthroughs would be enhanced. Few of the world’s major problems are best approached from a single disciplinary perspective, yet research universities generally sequester their best talent along departmental lines.
» via Inside Higher Ed
“Libraries can make this happen by becoming more open than we’ve ever been before. Not only in terms of space (although that is really important), but we need to identify ways that we can remove whatever roadblocks exist between us and community partners who are ready and willing to help us take on our technological challenges.”
(via unlibrarian)
For Local NBC Stations, Collaborative Journalism
In a sign of increasing collaboration between journalism groups, NBC on Tuesday will announce a series of partnerships between its television stations and nonprofit news organizations.
Effectively immediately, NBC’s station in Chicago will work with The Chicago Reporter blog and magazine; its station in Philadelphia, with WHYY, a public radio station, and its community site NewsWorks; and its station in Los Angeles, with KPCC, a public radio station. All 10 of NBC’s stations will at times collaborate with ProPublica, the acclaimed investigative journalism nonprofit organization.
The partnerships — which NBC said would help its stations better cover their cities — are a byproduct of Comcast’s successful bid to gain control of NBC Universal, including the 10 television stations owned by NBC. As the government considered the bid last year, Comcast made a number of promises about news coverage, one of them being that it would set up such partnerships with at least five of its stations. The proposal was modeled after the relationship between the NBC station KNSD in San Diego and the local Web site voiceofsandiego.org.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
