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Increasing use of online conferencing systems, particularly over the past year, has highlighted problems in these systems, especially their poor support for small group interactions within larger meetings. These include clumsy small group formation (e.g., issues around joining and leaving existing groups), the difficulty of getting the correct level of audio isolation between groups, poor provision for shared editing of documents, as well as fatiguing aspects of video conferencing caused by presentation format and the necessity of remaining on camera view. This paper describes the motivation, design and implementation of a prototype online conferencing system, called BubbleVideo. Building on both virtual world and pure video paradigms, it implements an extensive 2D world with shared documents, in which users appear through real-time video, presented in “bubbles” that can be moved around. Users are given the possibility of deciding whether to join a group by viewing a conversation “leakage”, which group members can share with outsiders.
Academic cognition and intelligence are ‘socially distributed’; instead of dwelling inside the single mind of an individual academic or a few academics, they are spread throughout the different minds of all academics. In this article, some mechanisms have been developed that systematically bring together these fragmented pieces of cognition and intelligence. These mechanisms jointly form a new authoring method called ‘crowd-authoring’, enabling an international crowd of academics to co-author a manuscript in an organized way. The article discusses this method, addressing the following question: What are the main mechanisms needed for a large collection of academics to collaborate on the authorship of an article? This question is addressed through a developmental endeavour wherein 101 academics of educational technology from around the world worked together in three rounds by email to compose a short article. Based on this endeavour, four mechanisms have been developed: a) a mechanism for finding a crowd of scholars; b) a mechanism for managing this crowd; c) a mechanism for analyzing the input of this crowd; and d) a scenario for software that helps automate the process of crowd-authoring. The recommendation is that crowd-authoring ought to win the attention of academic communities and funding agencies, because, given the well-connected nature of the contemporary age, the widely and commonly distributed status of academic intelligence and the increasing value of collective and democratic participation, large-scale multi-authored publications are the way forward for academic fields and wider academia in the 21st century.