XplanaZine

Dan Gilmore is writing a book. Listen to how he describes it in this article — “I’m working on a book, and invite you to be part of it. . . . I’m doing the typical research: reading, interviewing, thinking, organizing, etc. I think I know a lot already about this subject. Naturally, I also am aware that I could know a lot more. So let’s practice what I preach. To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline below. My publisher, O’Reilly & Associates, agreed that this was a good idea.”

A collaborative book. But more than that, a collaborative attitude about knowledge. This is the obvious result of Internet technologies, and it is an example of the same siren of education that called me to be a teacher.

I was a very young graduate student in 1981, and relatively clueless about most things. I was lucky enough to have a mentor, however, and one day he asked me if I would like to collaborate with him on an article he was writing. I can still remember the excitement. I treasured the camaraderie we shared through that process and, most of all, the learning opportunity that collaboration afforded me.

Fast forward more than two decades and I find myself part of a collaborative venture to provide information to educators regarding technology. I still love the camaraderie. I still treasure the many things I learn from my friends and colleagues. And I am acutely aware that the intense collaboration that marks my life now is attributable to the evolution of the Web.

The Web is, by definition, a medium for connecting things. In the early days, we were happy with finding “cool” Web sites. Later, we became enamored of e-mail and other communication services afforded by the medium.

One of the first “collaborative” educational uses of the Web was to link students together with pen pals. As the Web has matured, group collaborative tools have become more prevalent. One great result of this evolution is the The Georgia-NJ Connection project. The Georgia-NJ Connection links Journalism students of blogging educators Anne Davis (Georgia) and Will Richardson (NJ), for collaborative learning and writing. The result is a special connection and a synergistic learning that transcends the common learning experience.

Collaboration via the Web, in particular, is the one “emerging technology” that is easy to use and that all educators should be thinking about how to use. Whether you want to author a collaborative article or book, connect students from multiple institutions and continents for collaborative projects, or simply do a better job of connecting with your own students, the technology exists now and it is completely accessible.

If you don’t know where to start, begin with what is familiar — e-mail. It is still the most viable and valuable tool for communication in our world. Almost everyone uses it and no one feel threatened by it. Group e-mail lists are a great way to get the collaboration going.

If you’re ready to move beyond the asynchronous pace of e-mail, you might think about Instant Messaging (IM). IM allows you to hold informal, immediate conversations that are very useful for project collaboration across the boundaries of time and space. For example, Xplana.com is developed in Boston but I live in Oklahoma. Ryan Sarver, the main developer, and I hold many project meetings and idea sessions via IM. The IM client keeps a history of all your discussions so, like e-mail, these sessions are logged.

If you want a broader, more organic collaborative experience, I suggest blogging . Blogging allows you not only a robust Web publishing solution (but easy enough for anyone to use), it also provides built-in systems for linking together users and their writing. Xplana.com is actually, for all practical purposes, a big blog that allows several of us to share our ideas with others. The secret of blogs is that their information is designed to be sent to anyone who wants it, so its publishing force is more centrifugal than centripetal.

There are many links in out link library that can get you started on collaborative teaching via the Web. If you have questions, however, I ask you to please remember that we are a collaborative community at Xplana. Send any of us an e-mail and we’ll find the right resources to help you. We may not be writing a book together, but we are certainly building a collaborative community for education and technology.