The next question I want to address was one opposed by Sandrine Romaine Cordozo and she asks can brainstorming sessions be considered an example of organized anarchy? And she writes, I was wondering if brainstorming sessions could be considered an example of organized anarchy. It seems that these sessions, at least those that I've participated in, start with a defined problem, but many other problems are addressed and solutions are proposed. Sometimes the participants change as well. Can anybody else share their point of view on this? And someone like Michael Dillon wrote that's a good question, and yes, I think they are. And then others of you argued differently like Barack K, writes, no, it's not, they're different, the goal of brainstorming is well-defined, organized anarchies are not well-defined goals. The technology etc., he goes on to give various reasons why and he says, that's why it's different. And then an anonymous person says you know the same thing, he says brainstorms address clear problems and the like. I do think that there is something to it though that there is some resemblance that you would clearly see brainstorming sessions about a particular problem, to address a particular problem as possibly redefining the problem, right? As the people go through adapting solutions of thinking about them, they may change the problem itself in some context, and others. They may pose all sorts of problems, right? It may be very open-ended and so, I think those are actually a little more common. But most of the ones I've been in have kind of an organized anarchy element to it. In fact, I can tell you a story today about what we did in class, which was I had the students pose, we split the class into two groups and one group generated problems about how we evaluate students for grades. And, they came up with all sorts of lists of problems. They brainstormed and discussed them. The other group came up with solutions about grading and evaluation within the course. It's a slightly ambiguous kind of issue or topic, right evaluation. But even so, in each group that discussed these, they would pose these solutions or problems and often they were either abstract solutions on clearer ride or solutions that would resemble other solution, right? And there were these efforts that will actually talk about problems while they thought about solutions at times. Even though they could generate them independently. In the sense that they would come up all As. Everybody should get As. We should have pure assessment in my class. We should have a clearer rubric for grading. They even said we should have survivor grading like the show Survivor. People listed things like we should have portfolios or that it's feasible that grading could be done according to individual guidelines. Like you would come up with your own guidelines and propose it to me and then I would judge whither it would be feasible or not and on it went. That I should allow rewrites on papers or that I should take the best of the two top grades on papers and drop the lowest. There are all sorts of feasible solutions, or that I should one-on-one assess people verbally. So there were tons of solutions and then there were also tons of problems, which are the grading and subjective at times, that it's not clear they're connected to the interest of the students. That they allow students to explore things, they often grading actually limits people's focus to the grading as opposed to exploring learning and that came of all these kinds of problems as well, and so what we would do is two groups man these different problem streams and solution streams, they brainstormed right? And they came together in class and I told them okay here's your list and put them all up on the board and I said I'm happy to change the grading policy in the class if you can come to a consensus on any particular solution, and convince people that it addresses problems that are of importance. And that you have enough participation behind it, that it's mostly a consensus. And so it was interesting, we created a garbage can in the classroom and it was all around kind of a brainstorming sessions. And what happened is really interesting, in some ways, I'm a manager of that, but on another hand, I just let the garbage can go and people picked. The first thing they picked was we should do individual proposals of how we're graded, right? So I want to be graded on things that I want to learn. And I can propose to you as an adult rationals for how it will be done and the kinds of tasks I will do. And every student will do that, right? That was the proposal that they started with. And the TAs and I looked at each other. My gosh, that's a lot of work. And pretty quickly they started affixing problems to that solution or arguing that the solution created other problems which was more work for us. That it would be impossible for us to get feedback that their grading will be non comparable, etc, etc. And so, it's interesting how the proposal lost energy, right. That that solution had a poor Tetris kind of fall into the situation itself. And it was the first one, so we spent a lot of time on it, and these other simpler ones, that probably had more consensus were never even talked about, didn't get addressed and eventually at the end we started finally talking, because we had deadlines, right? Only 30 minutes are so to talk about these. We had deadlines and they quickly started rushing through various things that were more feasible. And as people proposed another solution like best two out of three papers or rewrites of papers or other things like in smaller solutions, other people raise other preferred solutions and argued that they address more important problems. So again and again, we had this problem of demobilization. And quite frankly, I probably orchestrated that a little bit in a sense that I just allowed people full access. I encouraged people to voice their opinions, and in that way, very little got decided. And in the end, we did find consensus on one thing, which was I allowed the students in my class they argue that the best two out of three papers is a solution we should do for grading, and it was because they were worried that their concern with grades was getting in their way from learning the material. And they weren't clear objectives behind the paper writing and how it was evaluated, and they'd like a chance to learn. And therefore by having this kind of leeway they could do that. Now of course, it's a little ambiguous but they found consensus on that and the TA's and I because we're big fans of trying to give people a hands on experience of the garbage can, came through and followed adopted that. So, I know we're softies right? But anyhow, it was an interesting process, and I think the point is, that is was brainstorming and that I managed it really as an enthusiast and the students caught on to that. And so, a couple of them said, look you're doing it. You are leading us in ways where we can't find decisions. You're not pushing things through. And in some ways, I force the agenda a little bit and push the deadlines and manipulated things in such a way that some of the decisions do get made. And I kind of did indirectly push things towards solutions that were feasible and smaller and rushed and worked out for everybody. So we did find consensus in one topic. But I didn't have to completely revamp how I graded the students. Which is, for me and this organization my course and my TA's allegiance to this course, a good thing. So anyhow that's an example hopefully it was of insight to you and maybe you know down the road we'll create kind of discussion forums where you guys do the same exercises in groups and what not once we get the technology improved and figured out that would be neat to do. So, there you go.
