As I have mentioned before, for my midterm paper I chose to focus on what can be learned from Moby Dick about creative collaboration. While many of my English lit classes have arranged peer review sessions, this was the first time I have "pitched" my ideas online. The comments that were most helpful (both online and in-person) were the ones which pointed out the holes I had yet to consider, and even suggested possible connections I had yet to think of. In a way, my paper on collaboration came as a result of slight collaboration on the side. After Dr. Wickman mentioned in class that our papers should not just be summaries of analogies found in Moby Dick, I was pretty paranoid that my analysis and thesis would not be deep enough or fully developed. One of the most helpful resources I had in gathering my thoughts and examining my conclusions were reading back through many of the posts that had been written by my fellow classmates. Some had also touched on the subject of collaboration, but even those that were not directly addressing the subject sparked ideas, or directed me to a portion of the novel I had not considered discussing. Bouncing my ideas around online and turning to social media as a source for my work provided more material than any other source! Whether or not this is required for papers later in the semester, whether in this class or another, I'm excited to continue this process!
Check out the final version here.
I agree that collaboration is very much oriented around the group in order to succeed. Though I don't think that you should entirely dismiss the "individual compensation"- I think that it would be possible when working in a collaboration setting to have and achieve both goals that you set as an individual as well as the common collateral goals. Ishmael for me is a good example of this, his individual personal goal in whaling was to learn more not only about whaling, but about the world itself. To succeed in this do this he had to contribute to the common goals on the ships in order to obtain his individual goals.
ReplyDeleteThe collaboration aspect is really cool. I enjoyed writing about it as well. The spiral of social proofing made it easy to narrow down ideas. I really like this process and hope we continue to do it as we move forward in our research.
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