Today my oldest son is graduating from college. I have talked with him in the last few weeks on some of the things that he has been learning since he is getting a degree in Chemestry and Chemical Engineering. He said that most of his classes are team projects or joint group reports. It is interesting that universties have moved from teaching an individual to teaching someone to be part of a team. We had some hands on seminars yesterday and the day before and I noticed that the labs were all done in pairs. I asked the instructor why and he said it was a requirement because they had 20 students and only 10 lab machines.
This brings me back to my question of learning. Is teamwork a necessary way of learning or is it an enabler to allow more people to get to scarce resources. I think I will try an experiment over the next few weeks. One of my counterparts is getting a new laptop and the two of us are going to play with OracleVM. I will see if we can work together on this and generate something more than each of us could generate on our own.
More details later. Now it is time to get ready for sitting in the arena for a couple of hours just to see the five seconds (ok 10 seconds because he is crossing twice) that I really care about. I care about the other 2000 people who are graduating but I just will remember the 10 seconds more than the rest of the two hours.