Educators are collegial by nature (that's where the word came from in the first place). Yes, institutions may compete for students and dollars or even U.S. News rankings, but by and large, I observe that educators and researchers are naturally more collaborative than workers in other industries.
Educators and Researchers have some unique challenges as well. They need more money than they have to get their work done (despite ever higher tuition rates). Just look at the cost of the Superconducting Super Collider. As a market, they are not typically well-served by traditional businesses because they are viewed as requiring low margins to be successful. Further, schools and universities by necessity are geographically broadly distributed so if economist want to collaborate with other economists they either need to do a lot of travel or embrace technology that helps collaborate from home. I think this need alone is what propelled the adoption of the Internet when it was still primarily a education and research network. Finally, institutions often need the latest and greatest technologies to get their unique jobs done and are willing to be early adopters to get access to it.
Since Sun was born out of the academy and we've been working with educators and researchers for the past 25 years, we understand these dynamics and have been creating communities of common interests to solve unique problems even before we had social networking technology.
The two latest examples of this are PA-SIG and I-SIG. Our researchers and developers work with customers to solve problems that wouldn't be solved working separately. It the classic premise defined by Alvin Toffler in his book Powershift (Published in 1991) where the consumer becomes engaged in the production of goods they ultimately consume. (He originally coined the term prosumer to explain this concept, not Donald Tapscott who took credit for it in his book, The Digital Economy published in 1995.
This is why we are so excited about launching EduConnection.org on October 27th, an online community of educators, technologists and contributors dedicated to sharing best practices. We've got the experience and engagement of great customers that we want to expand to all domains of education and research.
