Ed Shepherd, a middle school administrator in Virginia and valuable member of my personal learning network, recently posted a call for definitions of collaboration. In this case, I decided to forget my affinity for 140 characters and bring it to my blog. So, what is collaboration?
Many of the underlying standards that define modern e-mail technology were originally developed in the 1980s. Almost 30 years after the birth of SMTP, e-mail is still the dominant Internet communication medium despite its significant limitations and increasingly anachronistic design. Supplementary services like instant messaging and microblogging have emerged to fill in some of the gaps, but virtually no attempts have been made to build a holistic replacement for e-mail. Our most important day-to-day messaging infrastructure remains intractably mired in antiquity