I recently had the opportunity to collaborate on a writing piece with +barry saide. This was a tremendous experience in which I got a chance to discuss, revise and think with an extremely thoughtful and inspired educator. The article titled "Reflect Or Refract, Top 3 Tips For The Reflective Educator" was featured on the ASCD Wholechild blog. While the end product of our collaboration has been very well received, the process on how the post was written had a major impact on how I think about professional learning among the educator set.
End Isolation
Through social media, we strive to connect and discuss but often, in my opinion, are just ships passing in the night. Writing, discussing and reflecting together is difficult and time consuming. There are many aspects to collaboration that make it arduous. But the true reward is that ideas can be constructed together, various levels of push back are presented and in the end a stronger more robust product is produced- one that is of much more value to others.Use The Cloud
Everyone is busy. According to the Bureau Of Labor Statistics, most people don't have much free time. There just isn't time to schedule a face to face meeting to discuss and collaborate together (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm) so it is essential to move this work to the cloud. This enables us to work asynchronously- something that my research shows so successful with students also works amazing for us as adults! Tools like Google Docs and Voxer are indispensable for this flexible, "on demand" collaboration. Of course if needed, synchronous communication is just a mouse click away with GoToMeeting or Google Hangouts.