Collaboration as Teaching, Learning, & Creating

What may be one of the most outstanding developments in contemporary society is how digital technology is promoting the process of collaboration. Even the design of applications is developing to enable people to work simultaneously from different locations on the same document or publication. The contribution of each person becomes an asset for consideration and incorporation.

This changes the notion of authorship and ownership, especially because everyone involved becomes an owner of the process. Even as I am blogging these ideas, groups of students/teachers/learners in the performing arts are coming together to explore their ideas, their resources, and their expertise. One of our participants is actually from performing arts administration, so that another vital perspective is included in this collaborative process. In collaboration, nothing is irrelevant. The richness of ideas comes from our diversity.

Collaboration may be central to creating and making in the arts. In collaboration, we need to be spontaneously open to all possibilities. This openness is central to the immediacy of the moment. In the open space of our creating, we include all possibilities as the reality of now unfolding. Our own education and personal development has taken us along a path of infinite possibilities, and as we discover the options and variations expanding our imagination, we improvise and experiment. This leads to further growth and discovey, for ultimately such creation is a manifestation of our own becoming. Individual creative process has been the underlying energy fueling our exploration of Technology Resources for Performing Arts Educators.

In collaboration we are concerned with breaking through the facade of deception that sometimes interferes with group process. This may insinuate itself when individuals perceive that the group activity is unfolding in such a way as to threaten identity and personal worth. The key to a dynamic alliance is not being swallowed up by the group, but enabling combined individualities to define the collaboration in distinctive ways. In such creative sharing, the goal is a process that accommodates and celebrates individual strengths and differences.

Digital technology is providing platforms for exchange and mutual exploration, for creating and responding in inventive configurations that grow into new instances of discovery and expression. The arts are especially poised to explore and develop this new frontier of human exchange and imagination. Technology has become a means for extending our creative, expressive reach. Internet2, the broadband streaming of multiple channels of visual and sound information, establishes a rich environment for creative work to be developed and shared at different sites. A new sensibility is emerging, developing a new medium whose message articulates the collaborative spirit.