“ 
1. Collaboration is over used and mis-used and is becoming a buzzword for business people and technologists alike

2. Collaboration isn’t the same as cooperation or coordination – each have different processes, practices and depth of engagement

3. Collaboration is a human process – throwing technology at people won’t magically/automatically create collaboration

4. Meaningful, productive collaboration won’t happen without mutuality of desired outcomes, shared values of transparency and information sharing, compassion, compromise

5. Collaboration implies that ‘the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few or the needs of the one’ and sometimes people aren’t really interested in living by that principle

6. Collaboration isn’t always the best process

7. Collaboration is not equal to Web 2.0

8. Collaboration can be a source of real value in the face of complex environments and situations where no single person has the right answer”

(Via Reflections on Knowledge Management and Organizational Innovation)

Spot on!

Something that stuck out…

Most kids don’t click past the first page.

 I like how they mix in old footage and commentary of classrooms from decades ago and the diverse range of uses for technology and learning that go beyond only replacing printed text with digital text (video, audio, etc.).

 Below is a picture I snapped yesterday at a historical school house building at our local county fair. Some things are very different from today, while some are the same…

See and download the full gallery on posterous

The descriptions on the front of the “Blogging in the Classroom” book makes everything seem so easy!

Copyright for Educators

”

(Via Moving at the Speed of Creativity.)

Just received this email from Derek Baird from the Yahoo! Teachers team and I wanted to pass it along to my readers.

Hello Everyone!

We’ve been working hard integrating all your great “sugs” (and fixing bugs) from our summer workshops and getting Yahoo! For Teachers Beta ready to launch.

We are looking for more teachers to join our beta program. If you know an educator who is interested in joining us, have them shoot an email to: yteachersinvite@yahoo.com Feel free to share this information in a newsletter or in a blog post.

If you have any questions, or need help with Yahoo! For Teachers, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks!

Derek

If you have any questions about the program feel free to comment!

CK-12: Remix and Share Your Own Text Books as FlexBooks

“CK-12 wants to bring open data to school textbooks under the name of FlexBooks. Through the tools on their site they’ll let schools, teachers, parents and students can pull articles from different sources . The books will be available to others via the site. The demo that they showed this morning at TOC really wowed the publisher-heavy audience. The non-profit, currently in limited beta, will be launching in August.”

“The UI for book creation is simple and attractive (the Engineering Book above was made during the demo). You can search content from CK12, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and WikiUniversity. The results are articles that can be previewed. Once an article is selected for inclusion in the book it can simply be dragged over to the Table of Contents. At any point in the process the book can be downloaded, viewed as a PDF or saved to CK-12. The internal storage format is DocBook, a format used by book publishers (like us; in fact the tool is very similar in concept to our own Safari U — just different source materials and pricing).”

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Such a waste of paper!

Instead of this I have been doing the best I can to utilize Adobe Reader as a way to read the PDF’s and take notes on paper or with a word processor. The new Adobe Reader 8 has some nice highlighting and note taking features. However, with any free software released by a major corporation, it is expected that the consumer pay for more functionality (Adobe Acrobat).

I found a really nice, open source, PDF/Note taker application called Skim.

Creative Commons Photo Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/43468891/

I must say that I was quite surprised this morning to read the news regarding Microsoft’s announcement of their 44 Billion dollar bid for Yahoo!. In today’s search engine race it is obvious that Google is continuing to climb in the market and clearly is the dominant player. It seems reasonable for Microsoft, who has the cash on hand, to put forth an effort to salvage their own live.com.

In many ways the easiest and most habitual action is to reach out to Google for the tools and services that they provide. Google Earth, Google Docs, and GMail are all extremely popular services utilized by educators around the country and the world. I use all of these tools but there are some aspects of live.com, specifically maps.live.com that I really like. The bird’s eye view is by far my favorite.

I have utilized the bird’s eye view in my classroom during lessons involving locations around our community. Something about the aerial view/hybrid view just does not cut it. In my opinion seeing a side angle of a building or a local landmark is preferable to pixelated views of roofs and tree tops. That opinion can certainly be debated, but based on the response of my third graders they tend to recognize the location much more once I switch over to maps.live.com.

I believe this news is a good thing for both Yahoo! and Microsoft as they seek to hold ground, and users, in the web search industry. If anything, I believe that it will create more competition (I hope) which in the end leads to better products for the end users (you and I). Better applications, that are intuitive and stable, can lead to more confidence for the reluctant teacher. Variety can be healthy. Even if in 3-5 years it is Google vs. Microsoft Yahoo! Ask Search.

Now I wonder, if this all goes through…will Yahoo! become Yahoo! Live?
Will Yahoo! drop the “!”?
Simply puzzling…