Blog Post 5: Collaboration --Jamie Rand

I have to admit that when I read the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities article, I didn't expect to see a section dedicated to World of Warcraft. Since I have extensive (read: shameful amounts of) experience with that game, I want to use it as a jump-off point to answer this week's question and to make some long and abstract metaphor.

It's amusing to me to think, academically, of playing World of Warcraft as a collaborative experience. Mostly what I remember from playing is sitting in a dungeon waiting for thirty-nine other people to get their act together and try to fight a boss. What that means, of course, is inefficiency. You'd spend an hour waiting for everyone to show up. Then another twenty minutes while they put their kids to bed or let their dogs out or ask their mom for some meatloaf. And when things were finally in order, when you were ready to go fight, chances were you'd have that one guy do something dumb, like stand in fire, and the raid, because of his idiocy, would utterly fail. Everyone dies. Then, while you're running back to resurrect, people let their dogs in, tell their kids to go to sleep, ask for some more meatloaf (or chopstick Cheetos into their crumb-covered maws) and the whole process begins again. Then at 3 AM you go to bed and cry yourself to sleep.

Like Michelle, I feel that it's important to have lone scholars. In point of fact, I've never had much use for collaborative learning. The article, however, pointed out something that probably should have been self-evident: collaboration isn't just waiting for the guy next to you to get his head and his ass wired together. Places like WoWiki, Wowhead, and Thottbot are collaborative projects: articles written by the player base that help other players through the game. In that aspect, I suppose, collaboration has its place, and it does, like your question stated, help us overcome the limits of our own knowledge.
I suppose that makes a pretty good allegory for academic research. It's nice to rely on the knowledge of others, on "theory-crafting" and research people have done, but that theory isn't especially helpful if the priest is alt-tabbed out and reading reddit when he (or she) should be healing. In short, knowledge is good, but application of that knowledge is more important.