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I give a workshop, offered around three or four times a year to Egyptian academics, broadly called ‘Scholarly Collaboration’, in which I emphasise the different actions we need to take before a successful partnership is to occur. These steps, which I brainstormed after a ‘Spotlight’presentation that I gave at the eLearning Africa conference, that inspired further thinking via a blogpost titled Modes of Seeking Collaboration (Bali, 2016), are: listening, broadcasting, targeting (actively seeking specifical collaborators), and ongoing interaction. Briefly, what I meant by each is:

Listening mode refers to reading what others write, present, or mention on social media posts. Two important elements here help expand the circle of people we can potentially collaborate with. One is finding ways to listen serendipitously to people whose research interests may not fully align with ours, whose demographic background (culture, discipline, research approach) may be different from ours, thus opening doors for potentially rich collaborations. We listen to learn, of course, not only for an instrumental goal of seeking collaborators. But one of the key things we need to do when listening is to notice and remember names, connecting names to research interests. How many times have I seen people miss an opportunity to meet the author of a book they're reading, because they didn't pay enough attention to their name? How often do you cite an article with multiple authors as ‘et al.’and not notice that the fourth author, whose name you never say aloud, is someone you now know?