The Anatomy of a "Failed" Collaboration *
Historical background of project:
At Camp 2004, I met Pat Gordon, Half Hollow Hills High School
Fashion Design teacher, and former LIU Educational Technology TEAM graduate.
With her was Faye Feller, friend of the EEV and an ardent supporter or
global projects, particulary
those involving children's quality-of-life intitiatives. They explained
the desire to create an "internet presence" for Pat's students
who had already accomplished some wonderful things when they joined hands
with Faye Feller's "Pumped
Up For Peace,"
a global clean-water initiative. Out of this collaboration came "Magenta
and the Magic Cloth," whose motto is to "bring peace to the
world, one style at a time."
Before the day had ended in that August evening in Southampton,
Long Island, the first draft of an
"online newsletter" 
was
created to demonstrate how easy it would be for Pat and her students to
have an immediate web presence - if they could provide the content.
To invite and encourage others to join this collaboration I created an open Invitation and posted it on the web. When possible, I looked for opportunities to "promote" this collaborative project and speak about it for a few moments to other students. My mentors were supportive.
Early in the development of this project, I began refering
to it as the Fashion Portal project - a special instance of the Classroom-to-Classroom
Portal initiative. In retrospect, this was unwise and added confusion
to other names associated with this project, including:
Magenta and the Magic Cloth, Pumpted
Up For Peace, Half
Hollow Hills Fashion Club, International
Students Initiative for Peace, Classroom-to-Classroom
Portals,
(http://eev2.liu.edu/westburyII/JG/admin/CTCP.HTM)
et al.
At the same time that I was trying to gather interest in this project among fellow students, I applied for an educational grant from Computer Logic Group, a Long Island based educational services company.
In retrospect, this exercize of writing both the grant application and the collaborators invitation, forced me to organize my ideas and operational plan. It was a good exercize.
Eventually, I expanded the one page online project description
to a full blown Powerpoint presentation
that explained the background and potential future of the Fashion Portal
project. 
The
impetus for this slide show was a summer class on the use of HandHeld
computers.
Reflections:
The Fashion Portal project began with too much up front mental modeling on my part and thus destined to be disappointing. Projects need to be "discovered" and invented by participants, rather than described to them. I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive. (bes/jg).
I gave the project a name - Fashion Portal - before anyone really understood the concept of Classroom-to-Classroom Portal (CtCP) projects.
It was my intent to build on the CtCP work I had done earlier with contacts in Roslyn, US; Inkpen, UK; Sofia, Bulgaria. I imagined LIU to be the USA host of this CtCP repository and collaborative software and to contribute any other way it seems mutually beneficial. Students could become intimately and ultimately involved in the European Union eLearning initiative and other global educational technology projects.
The discontinuity of projects (more accurately, the non-assured continuity)
from one TEAM group of students (each semester) to subsequent TEAMs of
students limits the scope and depth of this (and other) projects. I believe
there needs to be a mechanism within TEAM that allows some collaborative
projects to continue development and maintenance beyond the original "two
year" development effort.
Related Project Documents
(http://eev2.liu.edu/westburyII/JG/camp2004/fashion/fashion_hq.htm)
and other useful documents to help organize the group's business. I have
long believed that even boring business documents and other materials
can be made attractive - not too attractive so as to detract from the
content and the message, but attractive enough to put an unconscious smile
on someone's face. While taking charge of this organization - the form,
amount, speed and the organizating effort itself - this was intimidating
to some at first, perhaps appearing arrogent and/or authoritative. The Fashion Portal between Romania and Long Island was to connect two groups of high schools students approximately the same age. One group consists of high school Fashion Design students in Half Hollow Hills Long Isand and the other group comprises a similarly matched class of students in Iasi, Romania - 6 time zones ahead of New York. Why do I mention this. Because, together with language differences, it is one of the special design criteria that had to be built into any curriculum and lesson plans coordinated between these two culturally diverse groups of students.
The collaborative project betwen these two groups of students should be an international project. That is it should relate equally to both groups of students. Magenta and the Magic Cloth, a global "clean water" initiative with United Nations support, was the collaborative project already chosen by the Long Island students
- One can call it
incomplete or failed because I became a drop out of my own collaboration.
I no longer had control of where, when and how the project was to proceed.
The project needed administrative coordination; there were too many project
aspects that could not be coordinated.
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www.jeromegarfunkel.com ..... jerry@jeromegarfunkel.com