The Flat Classroom Story
In 2006, Julie Lindsay, then in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I had connected via a blog post I had written. But before then, we actually “met” in my K12online wiki presentation as she worked with Reuven Warber on our wiki competition (where my students served as moderators but we didn’t tell them there were students until afterwards.)

The first Flat classroom project was born (we moved the site from flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com to an archive courtesy of Adam frey) and things started happening so quickly. Two weeks into the project, Thomas Friedman found out what we were doing and emailed Julie. Then, I had set up some notifications on the name Flat Classroom and got notice that someone had already bought flatclassroomproject.com and flatclassroom.com — WHAT? So, scratching our heads, we kept on working. Before we started, we recruited some amazing advisors and judges Terry Freedman, Jo McLeay, Darren Kuropatwa, and Jeff Utecht. They not only judged our videos, they were brutally honest with us and gave us feedback to take it further. This project won quite a few awards including ISTE’s Online Learning AWard and the Taking IT Global award, but I’m not going to go into big detail here on everything because you can see all this on our website.

Our goal was to move towards true teaching of collaborative writing, move to higher levels of co-creation, and promote excellence in global collaboration. It has driven our decisions. We were able to secure some sponsors and in-kind donations. Created our nonprofit