Martin Pluss

HI all,

Cool Cat Teacher has made and excellent post on the attribution of ideas.

It got me thinking again about something I have  already been thinking about – does it mean I am stealing Vicki’s idea by doing a post on it?

Anyway I made this comment on the post:

I am interested in this post.  I am doing a presentation later this month and I intend to speak about Viral Professional development and networking in relation to Twitter. 

I felt I had the idea in my head and then I came across Jenny’s website and she articulated better than I had formulated to that point.   

There are two things I can think of which make the attribution of some ideas difficult.  There was a cultural anthropologists Carl Sauer who described how  similar ideas developed among different tribe on different continents  prior to intercontinental crossings -  I mean  tens of thousounds of years ago.  Last century Carl Jung talked a lot about collective sub-consciousness where  people can come up with similar ideas without  actually sharing them with each other.

I  do see ideas re tweeted and when we are in the same circle of followers it becomes obvious where the ideas came from – such as the seven habits of  writers which did the rounds today and started with Zen Habits.  

Needless to say  it is important to attribute the ideas if you know and as you suggest pass them through to other people.

Thanks for the post.

Now thinking about it a bit more -only about 5 more minutes.  I did not see the paper Vicki refers to at the beginning of the post.  I intend to use the idea and now I have to also attribute the idea to Jenny, and Vicki etal. 

I guess  now I am wondering what I need to do when I use the term edupunk.  Now I never thought of that idea before but I do note that James Farmer had a similar  concepts ( though I cannot find the post) a few years before edupunk became more popular recently.

I don’t really want to get bogged down in researching  who developed a concept and  lose the momentum of sharing  ideas with like minded friends and colleagues.  I will just have to do the best I can in the same way Vicki etal did.

I think there is some merit in the ideas of Carl Sauer and Carl Jung’s idea of collective unconsciousness - I incorrectly used the word sub- consciousness in the comment. 

cheers  Martin 

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