Mantras to live by
You are not alone. Knowing that they can work with others on this project is a comfort for most students, but working in groups has its own set of challenges and caveats, starting with the importance of forming working teams that have a balance of skills and creativity. To help optimize group dynamics, it is useful to have students complete a questionnaire that polls their digital experience and creative interests before assigning students to groups.
Make the mess before you clean it up. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for students with Scalar is to stop thinking linearly. Even with open-ended prompts that encourage creative and “out of the box” thinking, students tend to search for form before they have content. They also tend to stick with the first idea or option they think of and then build on it rather than gathering a palette of ideas without judgment to assess later. Use of group process strategies such as Nominal Group Technique can help address this problem. NGT requires individual members of the group to list ideas they have brainstormed without discussion. Once everyone’s ideas are on a whiteboard of sheet of newsprint, the group discusses the merits of each before rank ordering how they like them. This process can serve as an effective way to brainstorm about approaches to the design or structure of the book as well as out the content of individual chapters.
