I’m pretty interested in how a community can crowdsource contributions. Whether it’s in blogs or in a collected volume, putting the labor and voices of many people toward one product can have dizzyingly powerful consequences.

But I’ll admit it — I was stunned to read yesterday’s announcement that Ladies’ Home Journal, a mainstay of middle-class American households for over 125 years, is going to begin having its readers write most of the content.

Readers to Write Most Ladies’ Home Journal Articles - NYTimes.com via kwout

Interestingly enough, most crowdsourced projects are labors of love, but contributors to LHJ will be paid standard rates. That surprised me, too — I erroneously assumed that this was, in part, a cost-saving measure, as much of publishing is in financial flux.

Students Speak Up in Class, Silently, via Social Media - NYTimes.com via kwout

The New York Times is ran a fascinating article yesterday about the role of social media in the classroom. And part of what makes the article so interesting isn’t in the article at all: it’s in the comments that appear after the article. They alternatively endorse and push back on the teaching strategies in the article. Many reference the image above and talk about what they first thought upon seeing it: gosh, there are a whole bunch of kids in a room, and nobody’s talking to anybody.

Then I looked closer at the image, as I couldn’t shake my own question: why are they all clustered so closely together if they’re “not talking face-to-face”? And then I saw it. The trio of girls in the center do NOT have laptops. They’re clearly engaged in a face-to-face discussion. Might this be a variation on the Socratic Seminar method in which an inner circle of students engages in conversation while the outer circle observes? This “inner/outer circle” really got under the skin of my SI 643 students this term when we debated the merits of book clubs versus Socratic Seminars, in part because half the group was muted and reduced to passive observation status while the inner circle got the cognitive workout. Neither role felt really fair to them.

With that possibility in mind, it seems that there’s no doubt that a Twitter-based (or other-based) backchannel could definitely enhance the observational experience for those currently resigned to passivity. There is definitely value to observing peers at work and talking about what you see. We have reams of professional literature that supports the value of peer observation as a means of growth, especially so when it is supported by discussion about what you see. As an example, the entire philosophy of Lesson Study, in which peers observe peers in instructional settings, supports this technique.

Watching others gives us new strategies for how to engage in face-to-face dialogue when it’s our turn. What the backchannel does is allow them to engage in conversation not only about the content but about the manner in which the discussion is unfolding. It takes an instructional method that has seen success (it’s not called Socratic for nothing … it’s been in effect for thousands of years) and deepened it.

Now I might be wrong, but it seems to me that the Grey Lady missed part of the story. So much depends on context, doesn’t it?

We school librarian types talk a lot about collaboration. A LOT. So it’s refreshing to hear the benefits of collaboration from a new viewpoint and to have a resource to share with colleagues that promotes the concept of collaboration without being WRITTEN by a librarian.

Check out the article by Ryan R. Goble and Nick Sousanis, “A Different Kind of Diversity,” from the October 2010 issue of The Journal of Staff Development, which discusses efforts to develop pedagogical strength by building collaborative teams across content areas.

Some nuggets to chew on until you can hop over to the PDF to read it for yourself:

We believe it is essential for teachers at every level to be able to teach “who they are” and “who they aren’t.” This ability to see things from multiple points of view is why many believe interdisciplinarity is essential for professional growth (p. 35).

The interdisciplinary approach is not against disciplinary knowledge. It recognizes the disciplines as enabling great sight, but insists that they do not show us the whole picture. In the same way that we do not have stereoscopic vision with a single eye, a single discipline’s reliance on a solitary viewpoint restricts our perception … when we start making a practice of pairing unrelated content areas, creative breakthroughs occur that transcend existing disciplinary thinking and boundaries (p. 36).

Kevin Dunbar (Lehrer, 2009)… uses the term “failure-blindness” … [which] describes scientists’ inability to deal with or even see unexpected results in their experiments, which happens frequently. Rather than realizing that they have made a new discovery, Dunbar says scientists typically dismiss unexpected findings as failures. Dunbar has researched these issues in lab settings and fount that scientists transcend their blindness most successfully when they debate and discuss ideas with groups composed of others with a diverse knowledge base … when we reach outside “who we are,” webegin to contextualize the content, process, product, and culture of learning for poeple “who we aren’t.” (p. 36)

Remember, interdisicplinary is not antidiscipline. (p. 37)

To learn more about these ideas, and to find out what the discovery of DNA has to do with cross-content collaboration? Well, as we say in elementary school, you’ll just have to read it to find out.

Oh, and don’t forget — YOU represent a discipline, too!