Collaborative concept mapping : an education research team leveraging their collaborative efforts

Collaborative concept mapping (CCM) has been a tool deployed by educators to enhance learning in such situations as primary science classes, supported learning environments and asynchronous computer-mediated learning. Of its outcomes, CCM has produced rich group discussion about ideas and possibilities pertinent to the topic or problem at hand. The majority of research into CCM has been explicitly pointed at enhancing learning. This chapter takes a different tack by reporting on how the authors used CCM to seek understandings of its utility in enabling collaborative research by creating synergies within a research team located in the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland. The following questions were used to focus the research: What was the research team’s experience of collaborative concept mapping? What propositions did the team construct about teamwork and collaboration? How did the interactions among team members facilitate meaning making about teamwork and collaboration? The data consisted of this team’s collaborative concept map and recordings of the dialogue during the process of constructing the map. Analysis revealed the team’s emerging propositions about teamwork and collaboration and also contributed understandings of the co-constructed patterns of talk that produced this dynamic map. The chapter concludes that collaborative concept mapping is a useful tool for research and other team development, and possibly for the collaborative conceptualisation of future team research projects.