Industry Resources: Additional Information on Collaborative Computing
- By Linda L. Briggs
- 04/19/04
This white paper from the Meta Group contains some facts and figures that may
help you make the sell to top management on moving toward planning for collaborative
technologies on your campus.
Visit the Web site built by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
to support its use of Documentum's eRoom software. Web site includes a catalog
of eRooms and advice and information for users.
· Overview of project: http://webcafe.wharton.upenn.edu/pages/overview.html
· Article by Rob Ditto, Senior Project IT leader: http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9201
Judith Boettcher and Howard Strauss lead a discussion on various collaborative
learning techniques. Also participating in this discussion were Lonnie Harvel,
a senior research scientist in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
at Georgia Tech, and William Griswold, an associate professor in the Department
of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.
This article discusses a new generation of tools is linking collaboration with
knowledge management. Includes coverage of Documentum's eRoom, the product that
the Wharton School is using for classroom collaboration.
If you see digital note taking as a promising collaboration technology that
will allow students to share notes with others in a group, Pen Computing magazine's
site is a good find. It highlights products across a variety of vendors and
comments on them. The editors cover pen computing, of course, but also PDAs,
cell phones, gaming devices, iPODs and their ilk, and much more. Recent editorial
included coverage of a ViewSonic convertible tablet PC that includes integrated
802.11b and 802.11g (five times faster than 11b) wireless access. With the right
software, such a product would allow students to take notes in class and then
share them wirelessly with others in the class. The product is expected to ship
in the second quarter of 2004.
At the University of California at Berkeley, James Landay has applied digital
note taking and a wireless connection to sharing class notes.
In his tests,
participants used software called NotePals on PDAs to take notes. Afterward,
the notes are sent to a shared repository, where participants can use a Web
browser to view the merged notes. One of the scenarios for use that Landay's
paper describes is a classroom setting. As the paper notes, "Sharing notes
with the other students in the class may help students take better notes and
might also set the tone for a collaborative, rather than competitive, educational
experience."
Collaboration technologies all too often fail to consider human factors. In
this article written for ComputerWorld magazine, Ted Selker, leader of the Context-Aware
Computing Group at MIT's Media Lab, states, "Attempts to invent IT that
supports collaboration often fail because designers focus too much on the technology
and too little on how people really work." Check out the rest of the article,
on work by students at Carnegie Mellon University on the future of interactive
collaboration by design teams.
This presentation by the Ohio Learning Network demonstrates how a variety of
colleges and universities in Ohio are cooperating through Kent State University
to create their shared online learning system with WebCT Vista.
The University of Tennessee offers a collaborative learning degree program.
While you may not want to go that far, the goals of the program reinforce what
collaborative learning is really all about: Not the technology used, but simply
better ways of sharing knowledge.
