Module 4: Interdisciplinary and Convergent Teams

Team Science

Overview

You might wonder, why is a class focused on ethical and responsible AI taking a seeming divergence to look at team science and how we work together? The answer is:

Creating ethical and responsible AI is a team effort, no matter what job you are working at!
Creating interdisciplinary teams is the best way to hear a diverse set of ideas and to help ensure that you are both representing your stakeholders and not missing any ethical issues (this relates to our second topic on co-production).

For this topic, you will read about team science and interdisciplinary teams and then complete an interview and writing assignment.

Assignment 1: Reading about Team Science

Read about Interdisciplinary habits of the mind
- Read: Newell, William H., and Douglas B. Luckie. “Pedagogy for Interdisciplinary Habits of Mind.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Education 8, no. 1 (2019): 6-20. Available online (open access): https://www.ojed.org/index.php/jise/article/view/584
Read about different models of leadership
- Participative leadership framework & different levels of participation
  https://www.cleverism.com/participative-leadership-guide/
- Consensus decision making
  https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/shortconsensus

Learn more about team science
- Blog post by Jeni Cross and Hannah Love: https://i2insights.org/2017/01/17/research-team-performance/
- Leadership qualities:
  https://i2insights.org/2020/11/03/leading-research-organisations/

Optional reading

One way to share knowledge is a concept or a thinking map.
- Introduction to shared mental models
  - https://www.sesync.org/resources/what-shared-mental-model-why-are-mental-models-useful-interdisciplinary-research
- Introduction to concept maps
  - https://www.mindmanager.com/en/features/concept-map/
- Book by Okada on Knowledge Cartography – preface only – gives great introduction to different knowledge mapping methods, from concept maps to thinking maps.
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42795891_Knowledge_Cartography_software_tools_and_mapping_techniques

Assignment 2: Interview and Writing Assignment

This assignment should be done outside of class and then we will discuss it in class.

Instructions for outside of class:

Pick a partner in the class you don’t know very well. It matters that you do not pick someone you know well! This means the research students who work together already cannot choose to partner up for this assignment. Use slack to find your parter. Let Dr McGovern know if you have any issues finding a partner.
Your task is to interview the other person about their research (or some class project) topic for roughly 15 minutes. It’s important that this is a topic you don’t know much about – if possible in a completely different discipline from your own.
Write down what you understood, and send it back to the other person to give you feedback.
Go back and forth until you have a document (less than one page) that you both fully understand and fully agree on. It can be at a very high level. Now you have your boundary (crossing) object.
Go through the entire process twice – once as interviewer and once as interviewee.
Share your interview document on slack (use the #introductions channel again, it is part of learning who each other are!)

Instructions for discussion in class:

Think about the following questions as we will discuss them in class

What did it feel like as the interviewer?
How about as the interviewee?
Were you surprised about anything?
Did you learn anything about crossing disciplinary boundaries?
What was easy? What was hard?