What happens when you collaborate with non-ecology scientists?
- You create a Transposable Element (TE) simulation model called TEWorld, with this logo:
- One of your collaborators initials in this project are TE (and you only realize this after collaborating for 4 years)
- You need to run said simulations on sharcnet, and one of the clusters is you will use is called kraken (or orca, or requin, or saw; obviously computer scientists are not biologists, or they are and the inclusion of orca is reverse reverse psychology).
Collaboration is on my mind these days. Ingrid pointed out this article to me, about, among other things, the potential pitfalls of group work. The author, Susan Cain frames this in the presence or importance of introverts, and how negating introverts has a negative effect on the performance of group work. Choice quote from the interview:
“Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas.
Creating a concept map as a teaching/learning tool is all about what Chris Orwig refers to when he describes the poetics of pictures: it is not only about reducing and simplifying, but also (especially) about deepening (or synthesis in teaching terms). It is this last part that makes it very difficult, and rewarding. And to make this deepening work, it is all about dialogue and collaboration, which is why I believe that class room interactions are crucial in this day and age of moving more and more to digital interactions.