Sharing Information

It hit home to me today about the aspect of sharing information and trying to avoid "re-inventing the wheel". A fellow from another school wanted to come and see what we were doing with our mac laptop program. After showing him around and talking about our journey over the last 18 months, he mentioned about his own school plans. To trial a one on one laptop program with a mac wiki server. His plan was to highlight the whole thing at the end by having a "sharing" session with the IT powers to be, the Director and any interested parties. I might add our system is a windows system therefore anything apple is considered in the "we don't support that" category. I pointed out we had already done that very same thing 12 months previously - to the very same people. He was rather surprised and wondered why he hadn't heard about it or been told about it. The need to share information. Hence, I suppose why this blog was started. We often have ideas which we try and learn from - only to find someone has done that very same thing previously and we could have learnt from their efforts - and probably been a little further on with our journey. Not that everyone's journey is the same. It depends on fellow workers, expertise, interest, support as well as community. But often someone's mistakes, hiccups or viewpoints can save us some time, and supply knowledge or information to make our journey quicker or smoother.