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.

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.