Two of my former professors at Harvard have described "understanding" in ways that I consistently go back to when I think about this word.  David Perkins has said that understanding is knowing both the parts in the context of the whole while also recognizing the whole as the sum of its parts.  Stone Wiske has defined it as being able to think freely and flexible with what one knows.  Yesterday when my brother sent me a New York Times article about Star Wars Uncut and its recent Emmy Award, this notion of true understanding immediately came to mind.

This amazing example of crowd-sourcing was started by someone at the online video site Vimeo.  The original Star Wars (A New Hope) was broken down, start to finish, into 15 second clips.  Then, users were allowed to pick a clip and recreate just those 15 seconds in any way they desired - animation, live action, claymation, flipbook - and submit it back to the site where the Star Wars Uncut team would pick the best ones and put it back together.

If you are even a casual Star Wars fan, it is easy to see that the people who participated truly understood Star Wars.  I think it would be great to see school projects designed this way.  This fall I'm going to talk to a French teacher about trying something similar with her students, perhaps recreating a play they normally do: Les Trois Petits Cochons (The Three Little Pigs).

There are some options for making collaborative concept maps.  Webspiration is an online version of Inspiration (and Kidspiration).  It's currently still in its public beta testing, but it looks like they are moving towards a subscription based model for their product.  Most of the functionality of the full Inspiration software is available, and it is fairly easy to share, import, and export documents.

An alternative to Webspiration might be to use the shared "Drawing" type of document available in Google Docs.  It requires a little more manipulation to link shapes (ideas) to one another than Webspiration, but the canvas is really flexible and with a little time, users can get used to making the interface work for them.

Etherpad was a simple and great web-based application that allowed multiple people to collaborate on a single document.  Google acquired the company that developed it and released the code as open source.  As a result, several replica sites of the original Etherpad have emerged. Google is supposed to be incorporating this technology into their Google Wave platform sometime soon.

The interface is simple and elegant.  A teacher or student needs to start the collaborative document space at site such as TypeWith.me or PiratePad.net.  A link will be generated in the address bar and this URL can be emailed to the other collaborators. There is a space to enter the collaborators names, an option to assign a color to yourself to identify your contributions, and a space for live chat. It does not use user accounts, so co would have to export the document  (or copy and paste the text) once the collaboration session has concluded.

It's basically a very stripped down shared Google document that is perfect for just-in-time collaboration. This tool might be great for a class to begin work on a collaborative note taking or document writing project that can then be later stored on Google docs (export or copy + paste).