Will blogged about his visit to the SLA planning session, and in it, he asked me a question:

Chris said something to the effect that his process had been informed by people all over the world, and that by being transparent about it on his blog, it had been a richer, more effective experience. (Chris, if you read this, maybe you could embellish that thought with a comment…but not from the beach!)

So I’ll answer as a break from packing…

For me, the edu-blogsphere has been my "critical friends" group. When I’ve had questions, when I wanted feedback, I wrote (or podcasted, when writer’s block hit), and I got amazing feedback from people all over the country. The fun thing is that I actually can’t imagine trying to do with without blogging about it. It just seems so much harder to think about it that way.

I’m a collaborator by nature, and working as the sole "employee" of SLA for the first six or seven months of the project was not a natural state of being for me. There were a lot of folks here in Philly, from SDP folks to TFI folks, who could and did help. You met one of those folks yesterday in Wayne Ransom. But even with that, the idea that I could use my blog, write about ideas, questions, plans and get feedback from all of the world, really did inform my practice. When we had our curriculum summits, questions and ideas that folks posed on the blog made their way into the planning docs. When we created our interview questions, several of the questions folks came up with on the blog made it into the final draft. And when I needed help getting my head around 1:1 computing, folks like Wes Fryer and Miguel Guhlin were incredibly helpful.

And then, of course, folks like you and David Warlick and Christian Long and Arvind Grover took the time to take it off-line and come and spend time at summits and planning workshops and phone calls. The friendships and collaborations that moved off-line but started on the blogosphere have been some of the most valuable pieces of the puzzle as well.

When SLA opens in 53 days (eeeek!), it really will be a better, more democratic, richer school because so many really intelligent, passionate folks have had a hand in the planning of it.

Again, the crazy thought for me isn’t that I did it this way… it’s — why would anyone try to start a school without doing it this way? It was a whole lot easier — and better — to plan a school by culling the best ideas from anyone who takes the time to express them than trying to come up with every ideas myself. And I think — I hope — that by opening up the process of planning to the web, by inviting so many folks in and allowing their thoughts to change mine, it made me more willing to give up my own ideaas and be a more democratic, consensus-driven principal when the faculty came on board.