Why we collaborate

In a MOOC a long time ago, in an internet far, far, away, a rag-tag team of starry eyed researchers got together to research about MOOCs (hey, I've got to setup an interesting getting together story, otherwise how are we going to get a movie deal? ;-)  ).

All joking aside, back in 2011 the 3rd MOOC I participated in was a MOOC organized by Inge de Waard called mobiMOOC. I participated as a member, probably a 'memorably active participant', based on the categorization of participants we had in mobiMOOC, and near the end something crazy happened - there was a call for collaborative research! This was unsual since my mental model of academics is that they (we?) tend to just keep our toys/research for ourselves so that we can claim all the glory.  This wasn't like that. It was an open call to put together a paper based on the MOOC we had just participated in, which was really cool!  In the end we had a few of us working on this paper, which earned us a prize at the Mobile Learning conference in China that year, and subsequently we went on to publish a few papers together.

I think it was Rebecca that had the idea to do a paper together on why we collaborate, and some initial data was collected on this.  We didn't really get far as a group with this paper since (what we predicted in the data collection aspect) most of us had moved on to other projects and we never really reconstituted to finish this.  I had put together an initial draft, which I had on my hard drive for ages, so I thought I would throw it up on the web just for reference purposes (as a working paper).  I know that since then I've collaborated with others in joint research & publish teams in Rhizo MOOCs over the past few years, so in case we decide to work on a similar paper, I thought it would be worthwhile to have (at least part of) the mobiMOOC experience somewhere as a reference :-)


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