Milobo’s Musings

Over the past several months, I’ve had the honor of working with a group of wonderful educators from the New Jersey Powerful Learning Practice program.  My focus with the group was on Collaboration: How can educators use collaborative strategies both in the classroom and in their own professional growth? We’ve spent time learning about the skills and mindsets needed for successful collaboration, discussing the challenges of collaborative learning, and discovering what others have to say on the subject of collaboration.

To welcome a larger audience into our collaborative learning discussion, I’ve posted the conversation starters here on my blog. You’ll see a link to a listing of the discussion starters in the blog header above as well. My hope is that you’ll share your ideas and thoughts with us. I also hope that some of the original New Jersey participants will be willing to share their responses and replies too.  Their insight and the discussions that resulted within our closed community were a wonderful learning experience for me.

I look forward to hearing your comments and continuing the conversation.

Enjoy!

I’m sitting here looking at my SMS messages, my email inbox, my Twitter replies and my Google Docs listing, all of which seem to be beckoning tonight. As I sit here, deciding how much procrastination I can actually get away with, I realize just how much of my professional life revolves around the ability to communicate and collaborate seamlessly with people from around the country.

Who and where are the people I’m working with? I decided to create a map just to see how far my little corner of the world extended out from Pensacola with the projects I’m working on right this minute…

(Click on the placemarks to learn more)

View Larger Map

It’s amazing to me that from my little desk, I’ve been able to work with some of the best minds from around the US.

Now, it’s fair to say that I instigated a lot of the collaborative efforts linked on the map above. There’s nothing more exciting to me than starting with a seed of an idea and seeing who out there will come along for the ride.  If you’re a person who relates to the “Now Discover Your Strengths” philosophy, it probably won’t surprise you that two of my five talents are Includer and Relater (the other three are Learner, Input, and Focus, which probably isn’t much of a surprise either).

But what still amazes me is how many of these opportunities simply wouldn’t have been possible just a few years ago.  It’s tools like Google Docs and iChat and Twitter that make the collaborating easy.  The hardest part nowadays is coming up with an idea and then seeing it through.

Actually, that’s always been the hardest part.

For so long, collaborating meant working together either in person or through mail (both the snail and the e kind). The type and depth of those collaborations were limited by the ability to find common time or by the inability to get in a groove when you had to wait for an asynchronous reply before you could move ahead to the next step. The quality of the collaboration was often limited by the quality of the people within driving distance. No longer.

So, what does all this mean for teaching and learning and collaborating?  How does our ability to do great things change when we’re not limited by the where, or the when, but by the what? How do we teach our students to aspire to great things when their greatness now can be judged by a global audience? How do we teach them to find, connect, and create with others both across the classroom aisle and and across the globe?

I’m still figuring it out.  The most important thing, I think, is to be willing to jump in and give it a try. Sometimes the collaborating leads to great things, greater than I could have ever imagined.  Sometimes, it doesn’t.  But, that’s not to say the trying wasn’t worth the effort.  Every experience leads to new thoughts, new connections and new ideas.

So, here’s the point to my rambling post.  The web isn’t about publishing or product. It’s about possibility. Possibility that’s only limited by the ideas you have and the people you’re willing to share them with.

What are you going to make possible today?

Steve Dembo posted an excellent look at Plurk on his blog today and did a great job of outlining what many of us in the Plurk community have seen in the last few days.  I certainly don’t want to duplicate his great overview, but I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on Plurk in the last few days and want to build on his thoughts and why I see Plurk as an even more powerful tool to build a Personal Learning Network than Twitter…

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