Cindy Underhill

Hi Sylvia,

I appreciate the differences outlined in the distinctions you've outlined. I think collaboration is quite different than cooperation, communication and coordination - though those aspects may be involved in a collaboration.

In my experience, true collaboration is rare because it involves:

• shared vision (which requires examination of motivations)
  
• letting go of control (hard to do if you have a notion about what would constitute an acceptable outcome)
  
• shared responsibility (for success and failure)
  
• flexibility and openness to change.
• time for relationships/trust to develop

Much depends upon the willingness of collaborators to check their egos at the door - and this is sometimes a hard pill to swallow - for any of us!

Interesting discussion!

Thanks to all of you who participated in this discussion with us. I've enjoyed learning about your projects and your perspectives on the issues we've touched on. I've learned alot and much to take back to our student team for them to look at in the development of the new module we are working on for the Digital Tattoo site.

Here is a link to our Slideshare space:
http://www.slideshare.net/digitaltattoo

Feel free to use any of the materials we've developed.

All the best for the holidays!

Cindy

Hi Sylvia,

Great questions you've raised! Here are a couple of examples of how some Canadian universities have responded:

• Lakehead University outsourced its email service to Google and was challenged by Faculty Ass'n on basis of Patriot Act. Ruling landed in favor of the University: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4054/125/
• Dalhousie students challenged University to offer email services that included social networking and collaboration tools - like those offered by Google. The US Patriot Act was on the minds of some of the Faculty members who responded in comments on this blog: https://blogs.dal.ca/its/2009/03/20/wantmore/
• Academic libraries worked to have Refworks (popular US based research reference tool moved to Canadian servers). Prior to that, many were using disclaimers on their sites.
• At UBC, we have been told (by our privacy office) that a disclaimer is important when discussing applications, tools and resources that have their servers based in the US and require students to sign up with email and disclosure of personal info. Here is an example of what we developed for LEAP (student academic support site): http://leap.ubc.ca/get-teched-up/social-software/social-bookmarking/

Thanks for the link to the Web2Access project. It is certainly an often overlooked consideration when thinking about incorporating social media into our learning spaces. I'll certainly be passing this on to my colleagues to review.

All the best with your continued work in this area!

Cindy

Hi everyone,

Welcome to week 3 of our discussion. For this week, it might be interesting to explore some of the issues facing higher ed related to social media and related identity, privacy, safety concerns.

Here are a few of the themes that seem to be part of many discussions in our Canadian institution (UBC), what about yours?

• open (the internet and social media) vs. closed (the LMS). Should we be restricting access to our learning spaces? Registered learners only.
  
• responsibility vs. user beware. How do we incorporate teaching using social media tools and approaches when most are delivered via servers based in the US? see FIPPA and the US Patriot Act. What is our responsibility to students?
• roles vs. integration. How should students learn about digital identity issues? Should this be integrated with our courses? Is it the responsibility of librarians, student development experts?
• social spaces vs. learning spaces. What is the value in blending these? Do students even want this?

Very interesting discussion series between George Siemens and Dave Cormier, sharing links, discussing resources and sharing their ideas while addressing questions related to social media and associated issues: Archives: http://www.editlib.org/view/33137