UW Collaborates

Please find great conference follow-up resources on the UW Collaborates Compendium of Collaboration web site.

About the conference:

Collaboration is a critical skill necessary to succeed in today's world — regardless of who you are, where you live, or the work that you do, you will find yourself needing to collaborate with others on a daily basis. So if we need to collaborate with others all the time, then why are some people so bad at it?

Enter UW Collaborates: A Crash Course in Collaboration, a FREE one-day workshop for all UW students teaching basic collaborative skills that will help YOU get ahead in the world. Let us teach you how to effectively communicate with your team, turn destructive conflict into constructive conflict, and leverage your group's diversity to develop outcomes better than you have ever expected! Our workshop is created with input by the Centre for Teaching Excellence, the Student Success Office, and the Department of Knowledge Integration, and we encourage all participants to include it on their resumés to impress future employers!

All of the skills we are teaching in our workshop are rooted in academic and professional research, and will help you become a better collaborator than you ever imagined. So why not give it a try?

Registration is now closed.

Sat, January 16, 2016
9:30am to 6pm
Environment 2 (EV2) room 2002

Speaker bios

Dr. Michael O'Rourke

Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University

Dr. O'Rourke's research interests include environmental philosophy, the nature of epistemic integration and communication in collaborative, cross-disciplinary research, and the nature of linguistic communication between intelligent agents. He is Director of the Toolbox Project (https://tdi.msu.edu/), an NSF-sponsored research initiative that investigates philosophical approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary research. He has published extensively on the topics of communication, interdisciplinary theory and practice, and robotic agent design. He has been a co-principal investigator or collaborator on funded projects involving environmental science education, facilitating cross-disciplinary communication, biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, resilience in environmental systems, and autonomous underwater vehicles. He co-founded and served as co-director of the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, an interdisciplinary conference on philosophical themes, and as co-editor of the Topics in Contemporary Philosophy series published by MIT Press.

Dr. Wendi Adair

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo

Dr. Adair's research focuses on negotiation and conflict management in the global marketplace. Much of this work investigates the universality of negotiation theory that has been largely developed in the West (information exchange, persuasion, decision-making biases, reciprocity, offer-counter offers) and defines cultural norms for negotiation strategies, sequences, and stages in multiple national cultures. Other areas of research include the role of context in communication, behavioural adaptation, and third culture building in cross-cultural interactions. Dr. Adair's research on reciprocity in cross-cultural negotiations has received awards from both the American Psychological Association and the International Association for Conflict Management. Her work identifying the different paths that U.S. and Japanese negotiators take to generate joint gains was recognized with an award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

Dr. Katie Plaisance

Assistant Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo

Dr. Plaisance is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Knowledge Integration, with a cross appointment to the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She completed a BSc in molecular biology and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000 and, after taking a year off to travel, went on to the University of Minnesota where she obtained an MA and PhD in philosophy, specializing in philosophy of science, in 2006. She also spent two and a half years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Ethics and Science in Hannover, Germany, before moving to Waterloo for her current position. Katie has several areas of research, the most recent of which examines the nature of interdisciplinary expertise.

Instructors: Interested in fostering collaboration in the classroom?

UW Collaborates: A Crash Course in Collaboration continues with a half-day workshop just for instructors on Sunday, January 17th (additional workshop added: April 5th).

This workshop is designed to give instructors information, resources, and activities to enhance students’ group work in the classroom.

CTE 760: Enhancing Group Work

Sunday, January 17th, 10:30am - 2:30pm
Registration and more information

If you are interested in registering for the CTE workshop on January 17th, or would like to further the University of Waterloo’s understanding of the use of group work in the classroom, we invite you to participate in our study by filling out this survey for instructors.

The survey will take approximately 15 minutes of your time and will help us adapt the workshop to your needs.

All instructors (faculty, staff, and graduate students) are also encouraged to take advantage of workshops on first day of the conference (Saturday January 16th) to gain a better understanding of student perspectives on collaborative theory.