This book presents our exploration of the concept of collaboration, as it is given meaning in communal everyday life, including our personal lives, throughout history, in society and in authentic fiction. It is for researchers, although the discourse and tone are not always classically academic. It is for teachers, although it is not always about teaching. It is for journalists, although it is not about journalism. It is an Odyssey even though it is not about Odysseus. It is for anyone who is interested in the esoteric phenomenon called collaboration, and who perhaps wonders why there is so little of it in a world full of people involved in struggling through their individual lives and full of people left alone, stuck in their jobs, or in forgotten places. Such people could perhaps advance in life by gaining a better understanding of how collaborative efforts might well liberate them. At the same time, we do not provide any solutions or scripts for how to do collaboration: our aim is to broaden and deepen thinking, not to constrain and frame it.
As humble researchers we try to explicate the phenomenon of collaboration from various viewpoints, including our own experiences, some of which were scientific experiences. It is our hope that interested readers might be served by viewing collaboration from more than one possible angle, in order to digest and understand collaboration in a richer way, as a phenomenon changing its form and sense every time we try to grasp it. We think that more collaboration in the world would improve the quality of life for many.
The reader should be warned that in this book we express ourselves in different genres, and not only for the sake of adventure. We include stories, fiction, scientific argumentation, explanation, and just enough clarification. It is our conviction that art and fiction, and other genres, may touch and challenge the reader in ways that scientific discourse cannot – our aim is to touch the reader, thereby broadening and deepening the reader’s collaboration space.
The authors want to convey their deepest regards for Professor Jay Lemke, who kindly shared with us with his comments on a previous version of the manuscript of this book. As a result, it has much improved. Of course, all content is our own responsibility.
The collective being called Jerry & Michael have harvested ideas sown by many people for more than thirty years. Our thinking on collaboration, learning and technology has benefited from close collaborations with distinguished colleagues, genuinely too numerous to mention: we hope that our citation of at least some of the work of many of them will be considered as an appropriate sign of our indebtedness and wholehearted thanks. More specifically, with respect to the writing of this book and its content, we would like to thank Mirjam Pardijs and Françoise Détienne for their continual judicious advice. Our thinking on the nature of collaboration presented in Chapter 1 was nourished by our participation in the workshop on “Coordination, Collaboration and Cooperation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”, organised by Federica Amici and Lucas Bietti at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, in 2014. Our reflections on argumentation and learning, presented in Chapter 8, owe a great deal to the work of and collaborations with Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, Baruch Schwarz and Christian Plantin. Our thinking on affective learning together, in Chapter 9 of this book, was deepened thanks to the European Science Foundation, which financed an exploratory workshop on this theme in 2012. Finally, the majority of our research on technologies for collaboration and learning (see Chapter 10) was carried out thanks to the European Union’s financing of several research and development projects in which we participated. On this last point, we express our warmest thanks to our great collaborator and friend, Vittorio Scarano, of the University of Salerno.