New Challenges in Collaboration

As performing arts educators, many of us are starting to explore collaboration as creative process. This is a technique that emerges from the spirit of Web 2.0, which places each person at the center of creative activity, unmediated by authority except the discipline that emerges from responsibility and an expanding base of knowledge.

Technology can play a role in this collaboration, but it does not substitute for genuine interactive exchange. Collaboration sets in motion a dialectic process that creates new materials from the colliding polarities of different ideas, a synthesis that forges exploration of new artistic terrain. We are at the beginning of this dialectic exchange. How does technology play a role in this process? Does technology confuse the issue and mislead the participants? How can we be sure of the sources we find through the technology of the Internet?

Web 2.0 is a scary proposition for teachers, writers, and critics who are used to controlling the flow of information and mediating correctness. One such doomsday prophet is Andrew Keen in his recent book The Cult of the Amateur. As long as we have mediators such as Mr. Keen, keen on saving us from ourselves, we have nothing to worry about.