This document discusses the skills and competencies needed for effective collaboration in the future. It argues that collaboration, sharing, sustainability and consensus-based work will become more important. However, assessing these "soft" skills poses challenges. The document proposes that collaborative exercises and practices, including "re-co-venturing," can help develop these skills while also providing evidence of learning. Peer assessment and tracking actions on collaborative projects may also demonstrate competencies, though knowledge of self and subtle social skills remains difficult to evaluate.

1. Simon Grant
What will we need to learn,
and have evidence for?

2. What this talk is about
• attempting to look which way the wind is blowing
• point out where a new direction might be productive
• think about the issues involved in this new direction
• we should be developing exercises and games that
supplement the meagre amount of collaboration that is
offered in today's world of education, training and work

3. Characteristics of the expected world
• collaboration
• sharing
• sustainability
• resilience
• co-creation
• the knowledge commons
• does this tally with your view – anything missed?

4. Some old -V- new comparisons
(to get the idea of how new this new world is)
…

5. Nature of work
• labour sold to employers for wages
-V-
• working collaboratively for the common good
– (and making a living while doing that, of course)

6. Controllers of work
• corporate HR, or entrepreneur employer
-V-
• consensus of individual and community

7. Communications about work
• portfolios displaying abilities to employers
-V-
• (a) telling others what work satisfies and fulfils you
• (b) pointing out what you see as good work

8. How has shaping of identity changed?
• “destiny” – context and society around us shapes us
– (traditional communities; shades of Goffman, 1959)
• what identity? we are just human resources
– alienated HR view (Taylor; Ford; ...)
• self-authorship
– (Baxter Magolda and others, 1990s on)
• personal ethical development across contexts
– (Grant & Grant, ePortfolio 2006, Oxford)
• identity emergent from self-chosen interactions
– (co-created, echoes of Simondon)

9. How have new ventures arisen?
• the most traditional societies: no new ventures
• then: sole entrepreneur; gentleman scientist; DIY
• sole architect – team of people realising the one vision
– (perhaps age of great individuals ended mid 20th C
• what great individuals are still active today?)
• pairs of founders recently common in late 20th C, but:
– how can there be larger groups of initial founders?
– how can a company be run with shared leadership?

10. Signs of the times
• the world is too complex for any individual to grasp
sufficiently to act usefully
• aspects of a good vision, confidence, and realisation
often start in separate people
• take a classic modern entrepreneur, Tesla's Elon Musk
– http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
– reversing established practice on intellectual property

11. What needs to happen
• people need to collaborate, so that issues can be tackled
– open knowledge
– open source software
– open hardware
– etc.
• can't be achieved simply by exhortation
• there needs to be sustainable culture of collaboration
and consensus
• culture of open

12. What people need to be competent at
• sharing
• collaboration
• consensus
• being open in some essential way, open to:
– different approaches
– different conceptual frameworks
– different points of view
• these are more than just knowledge and skills
• but we can think about how they contribute

13. What people need to learn about
• resulting in knowledge and understanding, e.g.
– about collaboration and consensus
– about themselves and their own motives and needs
• and how they work in different contexts
– about how they come across to other people
– about other people and their needs
– about appropriate transparency
– about when apparent co-operation is deceptive

14. What people need to learn to do
• resulting in skill or practical ability, e.g.
– how to communicate openly
– how to be open about their own ideas
– how to be open to new ideas
– how to behave collaboratively
– how to promote collaborative behaviour
– how to model and lead collaboration
– how to facilitate collaborative activities
– how to participate in consensus decision making
– how to lead consensus decision making
– how to detect non-collaborative behaviour

15. Where is the evidence for these?
• evidence of knowledge is fairly easy to assess
– except when it comes to knowledge about oneself
• how do we assess the skills or practical abilities that are
the outcome of the learning?
• even harder, how do we assess these competences?

16. Possible evidence
• (obviously) peer report and reputation
– social networks not very helpful yet (not even LinkedIn)
• portfolios, if composed collectively
• products of analysis
– of material written by individuals
– about individual and collective values
• metrics of actions taken, e.g. on wiki site?
– that's something you could look at on e.g. Wikipedia
– the “big data” approach

17. Possible assessment
• assess most knowledge in the normal ways
• portfolio assessment is possible for some abilities
• generally, peer assessment may be plausible
• but...
– what about knowledge of self and others?
– what about the subtleties of social abilities?
• e.g. detection of insincere collaboration?

18. Assessment by practice
• as part of real live work
– in apprenticeship / internship / traineeship
– but easier to see this for traditional work than for
collaboration
• live adventure-based exercises
• games – what might work?
– e.g. Co-opoly ?
• development exercises, together with learning?
• and, how much does any practice involve enculturation?
– real life leaves marks on people – ethics of this?

19. Re-co-venturing idea
• newly discovered example of a collaborative
development process
• provides stimulus and space to explore
• opens up thinking along multiple avenues, not just one
• designed for collaborative development, not assessment
• could be developed into a rich source of evidence for
“co-formative” assessment
– formative both of personal direction and new ideas
– formative for both parties in the conversation
• http://www.simongrant.org/rcvi/

20. Re-co-venturing process
• reflect on your abilities (classic development practice)
• reflect on the situations where you shine (occasional)
• think about the ventures you value (new)
• craft two “briefs” and bring them to meeting (new)
– personal brief about what you want to offer
– venture brief about what you want to see happen
• series of conversations in which each venture brief
meets each personal brief
• find a best-fitting role from each conversation
• take it forward from there in any way

21. Provisional conclusions
• we will need to (re)learn how to collaborate and share
• “re-co-venturing” is just a first small pointer to a greatly
challenging area of collaborative exercise
• collaborative practice, undertaken for its own sake,
results in learning, and can provide evidence of learning
what is necessary for effective collaboration
• existing collaborative practices can be extended to
include exercises and games, either of which can also
produce evidence, as well as formatively pointing people
in a good future direction

22. Thanks: here's your sharing licence
This presentation “What will we need to learn, and have evidence for?”
by Simon Grant (asimong (gmail etc.); @asimong)
of Cetis http://www.cetis.ac.uk/ is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/