The video below shows what the process of collaboration looks like from the student end of SFW. Note that in many ways it seems like pretty standard collaboration, with two major differences.
First, the student edits their own copy of pages instead of editing communal pages. This solves an awful lot of problems that I’ll ennumerate at a later time.
Second, the student collaborates with people not by virtue of some externally or internally defined group membership, but rather by the ever expanding and sometimes shrinking “neighborhood” which adds sites to the reading/workspace based on the authors and curators of pages the student has viewed/edited.
The take-away? As a person that has written something close to 2,000 blog posts over the past decade or so, for me the best description is that it is some combination of blogging and wiki. The stuff you do is very wiki-like: recursive writing/editing, collaborative knowledge building, etc. But the way you do it is to build out your own site. You are engaged in building the sort of personal site you want, and you don’t need to get anyone’s permission for that.
The combination allows for some of the personal vibrancy (and diversity) of blogging while engaged in very un-bloglike, recursive, news-peg-less activities. And just as with blogging communities, the sum here ends up being much greater than it’s parts, over time taking on a life of its own.
P.S. I know Rolin Moe will *love* my use of the work curation here, but we lack another word for the process of collecting web materials into our own spaces and annotating them. So there you go. FWIW, web surfing isn’t really surfing either. 😉
Hapgood 
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