Cheating as learning is a very interesting point here. I lived in Oman for a few years and there the style of learning encourages ‘helping’ others learn things. For us, a student giving an answer on a test is “cheating”, but to them it is a way of helping and learning. Perhaps they have a better way of moving forward to collaboration than we do, because of this helping and building nature?
On a different note, something that has come up recently for me is what you talk about in the evaluating technology piece. If you are using blogging, twitter and googledocs to attain certain goals, it is much easier to get people on board because they see: what they are doing, why they are doing it, and when it is appropriate. Often tools are thrown around because they are novel, but there is an adoption phase where it is difficult to see the value to the user of that tool. If we know the what, why, and when of using tools, we have a clear framework to move forward.

Daniel