2008 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Collaboration Webs - 0 views
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A wide variety of webware applications exist to manage the creation and workflow of rich media projects
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Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08How can this change the way your students learn and collaborate?
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In contrast to productivity applications, which enable users to perform a specific task or create a particular product, collaborative workspaces are “places” where groups of people gather resources or information related to their personal or professional lives.
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these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources, often quite transparently
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They are easy to create, and they allow people to jointly collaborate on complex projects using low-cost, simple tools.
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The essential attribute of the technologies in this set is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress. All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more. Using them, groups can collaborate on projects online, anywhere there is Internet access; interim results of research can be shared among a team, supporting illustrations and tables created, and all changes and iterations tracked, documented, and archived. In class situations, faculty can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time. Students can work with other students in distant locations, or with faculty as they engage in fieldwork.
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A virtual collaborative workspace for a course or study group can be assembled quickly using tools, or widgets, that can pull information from a variety of sources
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The same tools can be used to set up a personal portfolio where a student can display his or her work in any form—photos, blog posts, shared videos, and more can be pulled to the page by widgets that grab the student’s contributions on other sites.
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Using similar approaches, online conferences and symposia can offer session archives that persist over time; simply request that participants use a particular tag when they post related content, and the widgets will continue to update the conference page as new content appears.
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Instead of the campus LMS, the courses use Facebook as their primary interaction and information tool.
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A course in Digital Entrepreneurship at Rochester Institute of Technology created a Ning network on the topic, bringing undergrads enrolled in the course into contact with over a hundred graduate students, venture capitalists, faculty, practitioners, and business owners around the world.
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An educational technology course at George Mason University uses Pageflakes as the hub of a learning community. Content is dynamically assembled from a variety of timely sources, integrating it with student work from Flickr and other sources, all via RSS.
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The Flat Classroom Project (flatclassroomproject.ning.com) uses a Ning workspace to create a sense of space that is shared by students located in the U.S. and in Qatar.