Life's an 'ing' - collaborating -  visioning, leading, self-organising, connecting, interacting, teamworking, coordinating, combining, partnering, facilitating, pooling, exchanging, communicating, co-producing, co-creating, co-authoring, sharing, collating, synthesising, energising, encouraging, supporting, empathising, respecting, valuing, validating - learning partnerships

Collaboration is the name we give to a process where people work together to achieve something they collectively value - a common project. Whether it is formal education or informal learning and development collaboration requires individuals to participate in a social process of knowledge construction often associated with making, producing or performing something. Knowledge is co-created by participants and emerges through a network of interactions and conversations and distributed and mediated by the people and the tools that they use for interacting.

Most of my working life has been spent in working or research collaborative ventures either with one or two individuals, small teams (less than 10), larger communities of interest or sometimes personally constructed networks of individuals. 

When I look back over 40 years my earliest collaborations involved writings on type writers then exchanging scripts and annotating them or literally cutting and pasting. In the 1980's word processing and email changed all this and now there are many tools to help with co-creation and sharing of knowledge and co-authoring of works.

In my own life my main collaborative projects are involved with Lifewide Education. The very idea is founded on a community of interest in which people 'collaborate' simply by wanting to identify with a vision and stay connected to the information and knowledge that is being produced. This is the loosest notion of collaboration - associating with ideas. But within this project there are other collaborations - around the production of a magazine, e-books and conference for example. These forms of collaboration involve co-production of knowledge and the pooling of talents (including editorial and illustration) to produce quality works. Mostly we exchange stuff and have conversations via email. We find that this works well for us. Our research involves surveys and we have a dedicated website to enable people to contribute to on-line surveys. We also create fora for people to exchange their insights like the creativity in development site. I have used wikis (PBworks) in the past to support collaborations but not at the moment.

I felt that I didn't really need the sorts of collaborative tools that were being highlighted in BYOD4L and then I read an inspiring story of self-discovery told by Jonan Donaldson an instructional designer at Oregon State University and I realised that I had also made this journey.

'New digital tools available to students have flung open the doors to creativity, imagination, and student-directed learning. The sheer number of possibilities is daunting for any educator. Educational theory can help guide our choices and guidance of student learning. Constructionism has inspired me like no other idea in education has ever inspired me'.

Our Learning Lives Challenge invites anyone to create a story about learning and development in any aspect of their lives using any medium and any digital tools to create their story. So my need is driven not by own interests but by the interests of others who want to express themselves using the technologies that they prefer to represent their own learning, development and achievement and this gave me another perspective on collaboration. Namely when a teacher relinquishes control over the way learning and development are recorded and represented and an author chooses to represent their learning using a particular device or tool, the teacher enters a partnership in learning in which their role is to try to utilise the particular technology, even if they are not familiar with it.

Chrissi introduced me to Paper.li - a tool for collaboratively producing content primarily drawn from the twittersphere. Here is my first attempt at using it.

The final day is devoted to creating which I take to mean bringing something that is new to me into existence ie this blog and all the 'ing's' that make up the BOYD4L are potentially aspects of creativity and creating. I'm currently interested in the idea of creativity in development and with Chrissi have designed a process to enable people to share their perspectives on how it emerges from development. The narrative illustrates the process of having a novel idea, developing the idea and then making it a reality. It connects and integrates the ideas of creativity in imagining, developing, making, inventing, adapting and innovating. 

The focus for BYOD4L is on the way in which devices and tools enable the creative process. As far as my own experience and practice  Web 2.0 tools have profoundly affected my ability to be creative/ inventive in my work in education and I'm grateful to all the people who have introduced tools and helped me use them over the years. Simply being able to create websites through drag and drop technology has enabled me to disseminate my ideas and create the infrastructure to support LWE.

Sue's collection of tools is really useful and there are many with which I'm not familiar. I will over the next few weeks try to work through them to discover which ones I can use.  I spend a lot of time creating visual aids like the narrative above to explain ideas and I'm conscious of mixing
conventional tools like powerpoint, paint, photoshop, drawing on collections of images and working with illustrators as well as harnessing some of the tools below.

A good example of this is my use of the explee animation tool described in my blog of 27/01.. to produce these animations I worked with two different illustrators some time ago - at that time I helped them shape their illustrations. These were then filed ready for retrieving at some point in the future.  That moment came when I discovered explee (thanks to Chrissi). I retrieved the drawings and did some editing using paint, photoshop and powerpoint before uploading to explee and then embedding the result in this website. They were entirely new representations that have meaning and value to me. Creativity in the digital world is often a combination of many things but it emerges through the purposes and circumstances of our life.

Over the next few weeks I intend to try out some of these tools.

Life's an 'ing' COMMUNICATING -  talking listening seeing feeling showing explaining demonstrating informing writing storytelling recording reflecting blogging tweeting and more

persuading negotiating smiling laughing joking shouting singing dancing painting teaching facilitating coaching mentoring advising counselling ordering leading contacting conveying corresponding disclosing disseminating spreading broadcasting imparting interacting engaging animating relating revealing transmitting transferring publishing reporting journaling, advertising publicising   .................... the list is endless

Tuesday's BYOD4L prompt for reflection is communicating its so many things and so fundamental to being human and living in all the day to day contexts we inhabit and draw meanings from.  Teaching as a parent, in a classroom or on-line evokes particular sets of contexts and situations and distinct repertoires of habits, behaviours, modes, tools and vehicles for communication. It involves an audience partner, family, friends, work colleagues and professional colleagues more generally, communities, the world and self. 

Tuesday's communication project was to keep my daughter's 18 month old twins safe, happy, entertained, engaged and hopefully learning and I can't see how ICT could have helped me. Wednesday I spent in a university talking to a people who were interested in LWE.  We could have used skype but being physically present was important to what we discussed the way we discussed it and the results that came out. But I did use my communication devices travelling there and back on the train including checking into BYOD4L sites.

In terms of time invested and value to me my internet enabled laptop is my most important
communication device I use all the time for communicating in text (email and more extended forms), and visually - pictures, photos, illustrations, animations, audio and video using a wide range of software tools and applications. I have a dongle which means I can use it wherever I go and I find the keyboard easier to use than my phone. 

I use my smart phone for calling and receiving calls, texting  and finding stuff out when I'm out and about. I generally don't post to my blog or forums directly and use my laptop for this.

I post to maillists, and participate in groups and forums in a selective way.

I have a suite of weebly websites which I maintain for information giving and community interaction. This website is the main site that I use to present myself and my work and to record things that are important to me in my life.

I facilitate a community forum on one of my weebly sites. I also have an older suite if wikis on PBworks which is now essentially an archive. Other websites I have built in the past also serve as archives.

In my LWE mentoring work with learner I use oovoo or skype but, thanks to BYOD4L, I will now check out google hangouts. We encourage learners to create their own website and blogs so that we can interact with them via this medium.

I have experimented with twitter and go on it sporadically. Just recently I have been going on daily, following more people and making daily tweets. I can see it has value but I remain unconvinced it's an essential tool for me.

In my LWE work we create significant content - e-books, Magazine, web pages, slideshows/ presentations. I share these through my website rather than slideshare. Just about everything I produce is freely available or produced under a Creative Commons Licence. I took the trouble this year to find out more about these licences.

I maintain my profile and updates on my work through my own website, academia.eu and Linked-in (see above) I have a facebook account for family reasons but don't use it very much.

My LInked-in Network

I'm aware that I do not spend a great deal of time in the world of social media and I am probably missing stuff I should know about but I'm involved as much as I want to be at the moment.

BYOD4L is a great opportunity to learn more and to see how other people are using tools and devices to communicate. I find showing and exemplification the most useful ways of learning.

I looked at the collection of communication tools and learnt about google+ which I have signed up for. I also liked the Answer Garden and Linked in Network mapping tools and have used them both in my blog. Thanks to Sue I have a suite of tools to work through and explore their relevance to my communication world. I generally take things up when I can see their relevance to what I want or need to do.

Life's an 'ing' CURATING - developing searching finding discovering harvesting recovering gathering filtering selecting choosing keeping saving storing archiving recording ordering organising collating categorising tagging filing re-presenting explaining contextualising reusing re-purposing packaging narrating re-framing connecting combining synthesising communicating collaborating sharing disseminating LEARNING

This is an aspect of social media that  I know least about and have most to learn. Using the museum analogy I see a curator (I created a geological museum in the dim and distant past!) as someone who looks after collections of things, who cares for and maintains them, makes them available to others, perhaps through displays and may be involved in the educational use of the collections, who may also search for and choice of the collections. I guess most of these ideas can be applied to collections of information & knowledge resources or artefacts either at a personal level or on behalf of a group or community.  I also found other synonyms like keeper, steward, custodian and guardian. At our dinner time discussion I asked my children whether they maintained any collections of things and they thought they didn't although they appreciated that they visited and used collections maintained by others - eg Youtube, Spotify Facebook Harry Potter... Liverpool FC website.......to name a few.

I know I benefit enormously from other people collections, for example I use google images several times a week and the repositories of  TED talks and RSA Animate and I'm currently researching family history using the fantastic public records which I can access through Ancestry.com.


I also curate for myself - this website being an example of stuff I'm gathering under the heading of 'my lifewide learning and development'. I have my own playlists on Youtube and music on Spotify. I perpetually gather articles and materials like images and store them for possible future use re-use and I occasionally visit slideshare and flikr for inspiration.

I also curate for other people - the mission of Lifewide Education is to develop knowledge to advance understanding and practice and we do this through our websites and publications. For example I think our thematic issues of Lifewide Magazine serve to bring knowledge assets  together and build a meaningful narrative around them and make these accessible to others. The magazine is the way we package display make sense of and disseminate the collections of perspectives and insights we have gained. It takes a great deal of effort to put together and we commission illustrators to illuminate some of the ideas. Having gathered made sense of and packaged these collections we make them available through the Magazine website and disseminate information about them through maillists community fora and websites. These 'curated works' are not just collections of existing materials they include new content in order to frame, link and build on what already exists. They are creative (new) products connecting combining synthesising and extending what already existed.

Similarly our e-book project is intended to bring together accounts of practice in universities and colleges. In the past the websites and wikis we created for the SCEPTrE project now form publicly accessible archives for our work. These projects to gather and create resources that ultimately form collections that are curated and maintained have a strong collaborative and community building dimension to them.

But such things are not the primary concern for BYOD4L and I am delighted to have Sue's collection of tools for harvesting and curating materials from the web which I will work through when I have more time. Through the examples shared on twitter I can see immediately the value of tools for gathering and collating stuff from twitter and I tried Scoop it for some topics I'm interested in.  In fact today I was emailed my first daily summary of topics I'm interested in and I now see the value of creating topic lists. A few weeks ago Chrissi introduced me to paper.li and again I can see the potential of this tool as a means of collaborative creating and gathering content around a theme like Lifewide Education.

Sue's tools

I connected to twitter around 10am and devoted a few hours to looking at the creativity tools  which is the topic I chose to look at so my concept of connection has been essentially to connect to resources that have been provided and following up some of the twitter links..some of which like the edudemic link  I found very informative and useful

Its been quite time consuming and has felt a bit random and frenetic flitting between different spaces different twitter accounts, own websites, BYOD4L website, links etc.. emphasis definitely on getting a feel, connecting to resources (albeit in a superficial way), embedded some resources to make further use (Answer Garden and Audioboo look promising for me). Also joined google+ community and shared my experience of using explee to illustrate its value as a communication tool. Chrissi's comments on my blog made me feel my efforts had been wqorthwhile.

I joined the twitter conversation but felt a bit out of it and didn't contribute. Seemed to me that you had to own apple devices to be involved. While I appreciate that the focus is on mobile people needing to be connected minute by minute. This is not my world. I am fairly sedentary and my notion of mobility is moving my laptop from one room to another. But I still feel connected to the people I need and want to be connected to. 

I'm exploring the idea of life's an 'ing'. It  led me to explore 'connecting'. I found a neat tool visual thesaurus  which allows you to explore the meanings of words visually to help me identify a whole pile of related and associated words eg joining combining collaborating bridging mingling assimilating attaching pairing uniting associating coupling linking sharing and fusing. In life we use different approaches when we try to achieve different levels of connectedness or connectivity in different  contexts. So what does this mean for tools we employ in the virtual world? Do we use different devices and tools to try and achieve certain forms of connectivity in particular contexts.