This week I had a conversation with Carey Pohanka, a friend in my PLN, about her students and their ability to use resources. We were comparing and contrasting the words 'collaboration' and 'cheating'. Through our conversation and the conversations I have had with others, I have come to the conclusion that both words can be used in close proximity of the other. Both involve using the resources of others in ways to improve a situation. The difference is one involves personal integrity and the other involves outright stealing. This brought to mind a section in Crowdsourcing I read not too long ago about Ned Gully's work with his website source code competitions at MATLAB. Stay with me and it will make since in a minute.
Gulley's contests were like other online source code writing competitions, but with one difference. 
Contestants were allowed to use each others code in order to create a better solution. What this meant was whenever a solution to a problem was deemed the best, it was posted to the website for all to see. Then every other contestant had the right to take any parts of that code, add their minor improvements and then resubmit it as their own. Gulley referred to these minor improvements as tweaks and if the newly submitted code was better than the original, it was then put into first place. And so this would go for a total of ten days until a final winner emerged. This type of contest allows for everyone to see how someone came up with a solution and still see if they can make it better. Gulley refers to these contests as "addictive collaboration" because everyone doesn't necessarily want to win as much as be recognized by their peers for their tweaks. In the process all involved help create the best product possible by creating the best tweaks. So everyone throws all of their knowledge and know-how into a pot for everyone else to use and build upon. Knowledge gets cut up, blended, and put back together at break neck speed and at the end of ten days, Gulley says the final product is better than the original submission by a factor of one thousand! Simply amazing!
So what, right? Right! So what is it that keeps us from sharing everything that we have to offer
in order to let others use it and make it better? Cheaters. I would venture to say that most of us do not mind others using our know-how to improve their situation at all, but for goodness sakes we must remember our personal integrity when doing so. When we feel like we are not getting the credit we deserve we become frustrated and demoralized. We begin thinking, "I'll be damned if I am going to work as hard as I can to have someone else steal it!" If someone else is able to use our knowledge with their own little tweaks that is great... we just need to remember two things when doing so:
Contestants were allowed to use each others code in order to create a better solution. What this meant was whenever a solution to a problem was deemed the best, it was posted to the website for all to see. Then every other contestant had the right to take any parts of that code, add their minor improvements and then resubmit it as their own. Gulley referred to these minor improvements as tweaks and if the newly submitted code was better than the original, it was then put into first place. And so this would go for a total of ten days until a final winner emerged. This type of contest allows for everyone to see how someone came up with a solution and still see if they can make it better. Gulley refers to these contests as "addictive collaboration" because everyone doesn't necessarily want to win as much as be recognized by their peers for their tweaks. In the process all involved help create the best product possible by creating the best tweaks. So everyone throws all of their knowledge and know-how into a pot for everyone else to use and build upon. Knowledge gets cut up, blended, and put back together at break neck speed and at the end of ten days, Gulley says the final product is better than the original submission by a factor of one thousand! Simply amazing!So what, right? Right! So what is it that keeps us from sharing everything that we have to offer
in order to let others use it and make it better? Cheaters. I would venture to say that most of us do not mind others using our know-how to improve their situation at all, but for goodness sakes we must remember our personal integrity when doing so. When we feel like we are not getting the credit we deserve we become frustrated and demoralized. We begin thinking, "I'll be damned if I am going to work as hard as I can to have someone else steal it!" If someone else is able to use our knowledge with their own little tweaks that is great... we just need to remember two things when doing so:- If at all possible, let the person we are getting the information from know what we are doing and how their information is helpful. Lets be honest for a minute, people are flattered to know someone else sees value in what they do, so make sure you tell them.
- Let everyone else know where we are getting our information from and how it is helpful. Citing other peoples hard work is your responsibility. You worked hard to create what you did and so did they.
6 comments:
Thanks for the link to citation machine. It looks like a tool I will use in the future.
Does the definition of cheating change in the k-12 environment? I encourage the teachers in our school to have students use all of the resources at their disposal. I like our classroom environment to be as realistic as possible and increasing the amount of collaboration is essential in the 21st century.
I think the power of collaboration is incredible, and definitely happens best in a low-threat environment where those who contribute can trust that their ideas will be respected, valued, and, as you point out, attributed back to the source. It's sad that many school environments/cultures don't utilize the incredible resources in the shared knowledge among the staff members.
@ Ed
An interesting post. I met with a school official who spoke about classroom design and how they had a chance to utilize creative furniture options but the faculty was afraid anything but individual desks could result in cheating. My thoughts were why are you giving assessments that you can even cheat on? It's hard to cheat on an essay or a compare / contrast type reflection anyway.
Ed,
I like this post, and I truly appreciated your help in planning my conversation with my students about cheating vs. collaboration. It went really well and I am pleased to see them sharing great things. They really seemed to grasp the idea of integrity. I had explained cheating so many times, but that seemed to make the difference.
I had an interesting moment today using our wiki and delicious bookmarks. My students are tagging useful sites they find for the project and I linked the bookmarks to our wiki so they are there for all to see. One of the teachers that is teaching the same class, showed his class the links that my students tagged. I felt violated! They don't use delicious so they weren't going to be contributing to those links, but were going to be using them. An important piece of collaboration is making sure that you are giving and taking. I guess I'll have to teach them to use delicious so they can join in the fun.
Carey
Hi Ed:
Thanks for the mention. Cheating vs. collaboration is such a fascinating topic. I am sympathetic to the needs of a teacher doing assessment, but in the professional setting, I find that jealousy about "stealing" causes a lot of damage, whereas openness to collaboration can make amazing things happen. For our contest, we have consistently found that people go through phases. They play, get excited when they contribute something, get mad when they feel ripped off, complain loudly, keep playing because it's fun, and then adjust to the new reality of shared creation. It's easy for us because the stakes are low; the reward is little more than the joy of participation.
I realize when the stakes get higher (when you're not playing a game), the problem of assigning credit can get severe. This is the problem of scientific publishing in a nutshell.
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