Catherine Lombardozzi has blogged about Collaborative Inquiry, a topic I’ve been skirting for a while with terms like: learning networks, un-conference, collective intelligence, distributed decision making, distributed cognition or connectivism. I think this basic idea is a natural part of web 2.0 thinking that is collaborative in its core nature. I also think it is a way to tap into the knowledge flows associated with Hagel’s Power of Pull thinking and is also just a good way to address knowledge areas that are in flux as opposed to stable and well established. Less and less of our practices are stable today and this is a natural way to gain knowledge and direction.
To extend this idea I’ve been thinking about why you would want to choose a collaborative research structure over a more traditional set up, and I’ve put my ideas into this concept map. It’s not a finished product; just beginning thoughts.
A Comparison of Individual and Collaborative Research
I agree that an advantage of collaborative inquiry is that it brings more voices into the meaning-making process. With an individual research project, we rely heavily on the interpretations of one researcher, whereas in CI, all of the members of a small group contribute to the interpretation of the findings.
In a collaboration between practitioners and academics, both perspectives have equal weight in CI – they collaborate on the question, the research methods, the dialog around interpretation, etc. It’s possible this process will give us results that would be useful to practice if that is a goal.
I’m just beginning my own work on CI, having assigned it as a class project. I’m looking forward to an opportunity to actually engage in a CI soon. I’ll likely blog on this again.
Thanks for commenting on my blog, and leaving a link to yours. I’ll put in on my feedreader.