collaboration

Spending a month at a scholar and artists' residency like the inimitable and incomparable Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria not only changes your work . . . it changes you!

You learn a lot eating three meals a day with artists, photographers, composers, poets, scholars . . . That's the Collaboration by Difference we HASTAC'ers keep harping on!

The term "synthetic intelligence" is sometimes used to describe "strong artificial intelligence" and sometimes to make the point that "artificial intelligence" as a term is an oxymoron. I'm not going to enter into that debate but want to here appropriate the term to describe a collective form of intelligence where collaborative kinds of wisdom can be aggregated toward some greater insight and even predictability. Synthesizing intelligence--the verbal form--may, like folksonomy, be a process whose product is only visible in retrospect.

In writing about HASTAC for another project, I'm thinking about what it means to be a network of networks. I want to give a shout out today to Mechelle de Craene, the spirit and organizer behind HASTAC on Ning, a Synergistic Symposium for a Cybernetic Age.

HASTAC has been pushing a management and intellectual model of "collaboration by difference," since digital learning requires the coming together of many people with very different kinds of expertise. Sometimes, though, collaboration is about sharing the same goals, standards, ideals, and sense of responsibility.

If you go to www.sparkip.com, you will find the best searchable database for scientific technologies anywhere. This is SparkIP, an online intellectual property network for the scientific community that was co-developed by historian of science Tim Lenoir and engineer Rob Clark of Duke and Kristina Johnson (formerly dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke and now Provost at Johns Hopkins).

Some preliminary and radical ideas for an upcoming sabbatical to study new media, social networks, knowledge community formation, and collaborative project-based learning

HASTAC Ning

Inadvertently, someone just attributed some text co-written by David (my HASTAC partner-in-crime) and myself as just by me. Even had my little smily proud picture up there. It felt so uncomfortable. Collaboration is a delicate balance of generosity and credit.