Group items tagged

The authors examine uses of instant messaging in a high-tech firm to illustrate how knowledge workers use this tool to collaborate with co-workers. According to Quan-Haase et al., the objective with the study was to 1) identify the collaborative practices of individuals in mediated work environments by looking at use of IM, 2) discern what social processes are reflected in employees' use of IM, and 3) investigate how visibility, awareness and accountability are used in an IM system. The research found that IM is used extensively to exchange work-related messages, coordinate and arrange meetings, and inquiry about colleagues' availability for discussion. IM was used as much for internal communication as for external communication. The authors also found that IM functions as a barrier in some cases as some employees use IM as a way to create distance between them and their superiors. Quan-Haase et al. suggest that this is particularly useful when difficult decisions have to be made or sensitive topics discussed. Quan-Haase et al. examines how workers in a small high-tech organisation manage their IM use for the purpose of information exchange and collaboration. The article is interesting as it is based on a case study of an actual organisation. However, it is written 6 years ago so employees' willingness to adapt to instant messaging may have changed as collaborative tools are more common today. Still, most of the findings are still applicable today. References Quan-Haase, A., Cothrel, J. & Wellman, B. (2005). Instant Messaging for Collaboration: A Case Study of a High-Tech Firm. Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/quan-haase.html

East North Carolina University (ECU) has used the virtual reality game "Second Life" as an education tool for those students who are still in highschool. The college has set up courses through Second Life in which teenagers can have access to as they are physically unable to attend. The article states that one main reason for this type of route is the lack of funding for early-college programs. The site gives a cost effective alternative yet still allows students to engage as though in a real classroom. An article by Dorothy Lepkowska. Which was featured in The Guardian, talks about the site as a means to educate teachers as well. She states "Second Life is an immersive 3D tool and learning environment, so it allows us to present things as we would if we were all in the room. We can take questions, show video clips and the participants can interact with each other but without all the time constraints and costs involved," Again the issue of cost is something that is pushing institutions in this direction. According to a Wire Feed, by Targeted News Service the University of Hawaii has also created their own island within second life. Their university building has been made to look exactly like their school, however they have been able to add extra learning areas than they could in real life. The main point of the article is the fact that Second Life allows those students to participate in a class like environment even if they cant physically attend. This brings me to an article by Mark Blakenship (2011) in which he talks about students being taken to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (a new addition to Second Life). He states "students can join in the digital Globe and get an interactive sense of what it was like see a play there. Inside Second life, Fiebig (the professor) also has students "perform" plays by typing their lines into the game's chat function." It is argued that perhaps students prefer this as the thought of talking in class frightens them, yet th

This article is a great example of online community collaboration, reality meeting the virtual world. There are several reasons for the University employing the use of Second Life technology. The reasons stated by the article were the lack of funds and infrastructure. Collaboration tools must all means provide flexibility when real life fails to do so as demonstrated by the article. The only doubt I have with online learning through Second Life is whether the students are more or less engaged in comparison to on-campus students. As pointed out in the Qualitative findings of students' perception on practice of self-regulated strategies in online community discussion journal article, some students in Malaysia for example regarded the use of the Internet as a distraction to learning, and preferred the more familiar didactic learning environment (Vighnarajah, Wong, & Bakara, 2009). One of the key findings of the study was that student users who were familiar with the Internet found it rather distracting to continue learning once they were online (Vighnarajah et al., 2009). With Second Life as the means to collaborate a community of students for this High School, I wonder if the technology is sufficient considering the environment of this particular online collaborating platform. I also wonder if Second Life as a tool is appropriate for students. My topic is on Organisations and online collaborations and I want to touch base on where online collaboration succeeds. Online collaboration is good for businesses or organisations when participation is often measured by contribution and outcome of a certain task. The same cannot be said for students learning online through Second Life. Reference: Vighnarajah, Wong, S. L., & Bakara, K. A. (2009). Qualitative findings of students' perception on practice of self-regulated strategies in online community discussion. Computers & Education, 53(1), 9. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com.d

This article is taken from credible source such as compilation articles based on Proquest - Curtin University library. The main topic of this article is that, Second Life as a cyber world which launced in 2003, is a free client program that enables users to have interaction among one another in form of virtual bodies along with avatars. Specifically this article highlighting on how virtual world is part of online education, where there is a virtual college that designed by combine the convenience of online education along with the atmosphere of a college classroom in 3D version. By relating to my own topic, which is talk about the use as well as features of social bookmarking site (delicious), the virtual world or in here especially Second Life as well provides specific features in order to facilitate the online education, it provides 3D experience which help the users as student to stimulate their experiences and transferring online education in the forms of digital. For examples one of the features in here is when student able to attending their classes, as for the value for the articles itself, it is useful and shows that there a great range of way on how people can use games and social sites merely not just for entertainment but as well as education. References: High Schoolers Attend College in Second Life. (2011). Retrieved April 17, 2011, from http://proquest.umi.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/pqdweb?index=10&did=2253249221&SrchMode=1&sid=14&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1302676765&clientId=22212

OVERVIEW Because of the ability to share and interact online, collaboration tools are being considered as tools that can help children with learning. Keith McPherson believes that students should be kept up-to-date on recent technologies as they help educators expand their notion of literacy to embrace evolving communication that moves beyond (but still includes) just reading and writing. He also suggests that "educators assist their students to develop critical literacy capabilities across a wide set of real-life communication contexts and technologies." The article then goes on to describe 5 different online literacy tools that can be used to aid student participation and collaboration and therefore help in their learning. The 5 tools he talks about are, Gliffy, Google Docs, Newsmap, OpenOffice and Delicious. Each analysis gives the reader a brief outline of each tool and the advantages and disadvantages of each. While exploring the strengths and weaknesses, there were many contributing factors that were evident in Gliffy, Google Docs and OpenOffice, all three of them incorporate document type editing tools which make them easy to use. Also, all three of them allow various formats to be exported and imported onto the websites database. Of course all 5 incorporate the main theme of sharing (so this is where delicious and NewsMap fit into the mix) However NewsMap is the more interesting analysis that Keith McPherson includes in his article. This site is very different to the other four, yet he has found a way to include it as one of the key tools for students. This site uses Google Maps, and, as McPherson states "allows users to quickly locate international, national, regional, or local news." He believes it helps literacy skills because it aids middle/high school students with learning about mapping, directions, news and critical thinking. This is perhaps a site that may not have instantly been associated with learning in schools but interstingly has been

This is an interesting article highlighting the tools that can help assist students with their literacy. I find this subject extremely interesting as I have studied via distance education and I know from experience how tools such as Google Docs can be greatly beneficial in facilitating a group project. Another way students can be assisted in learning is through the use of videoconferencing. Videoconferences can assist students that are restricted due to physical disabilities or geographical limitations. By using videoconferencing software such as Skype in the classroom, students can be exposed to a number of different teaching methods or styles and other students. One of the great benefits with videoconferencing is providing students with motivation (Masum, Brooks and Spence, 2005). Instead of students feeling isolated with their learning they can use videoconferencing to discuss and share ideas with other teachers and students on a worldwide basis. By incorporating tools such as Google Docs, Delicious and video conferencing software, teachers can provide a more interesting way of teaching students. Google Docs could be used to facilitate the collection of ideas, Delicious can be used to share links and articles, while follow up and discussion of those ideas could take place through videoconferencing. This would present a student, that has restricted access to a school, with a full rounded experience of being in a classroom without physically having to leave their home. References: Masum, H., Brooks, M. and Spence, J. Music Grid: A case study in video collaboration. First Monday. Retrieved on 16 April 2011 from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/1238/1158

In this paper, the authors examine the use of instant messaging (IM) during face-to-face, telephone, and computer-mediated team meetings, a practice they call "invisible whispering". Dennis et al. argue that organisational decision making is dominated by teams as a team has more resources, knowledge, and political insight than any one individual working alone. Collaboration technology has come to play an important role as teams have become more geographically distributed. The authors analyse how invisible whispering alters the socio-spatial and temporal boundaries of team decision making by using Goffman's theatrical conceptualisation of social interaction. Dennis et al. suggest that invisible whispering constitutes a new communicative genre. They distinguish between six types of invisible whispering and then describe how meeting participants used these practices to restructure the socio-spatial and temporal boundaries of collaborative decision making process. Findings from the research showed that invisible whispering is likely to improve the efficiency of collaborative decision making. However, they also found mixed effects on decisions quality, satisfaction, individual comprehension, and the relationship between group members. The paper is important as it shows how instant messaging can be used within organisations a decision making tool. The authors argue that workers are able to influence front stage decision making through backstage conversations, which would have been physically impossible or socially constrained without the use of IM. This proves that instant messaging is an important collaborative tool that organisations can benefit from. References Dennis, A. R., Rennecker, J. A., Hansen, S. (2010). Invisible Whispering: Restructuring Collaborative Decision Making with Instant Messaging. Decision Sciences, 41(4), 845-886. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5915.2010.00290.x/pdf

By examining the practice the use of Instant Messaging (IM) for undetectable conversations during meetings, termed 'invisible whispering', this paper provides an interesting example of how communication technologies are changing collaboration. Collaboration generally relies on trust and/or effective collaborative mechanisms (Mockus et al., 2002). However, employees of the two firms studied in this paper regularly used IM to communicate secretly with each other or with others outside of the meeting. I found it interesting that the previously unacceptable practice of whispered conversations became acceptable when conducted using digital means - probably partly due to increased speed and efficiency offered by multiple synchronous conversations (p. 856). To me, the importance of such a case study is that it demonstrates how socio-spatial boundaries have been expanded. In this case, invisible whispering alters socio-spatial boundaries by bringing in the influence of outsiders, and by allowing conversations that would have occurred at another time to be brought into the context of current conversation. As such, this paper provides a good launching pad for considering the scope of online collaboration's influence. An examination of online collaboration projects such as open source software or Wikipedia reveals that, generally, online collaboration has worked to break down socio-spatial limitations by allowing the participation of more people than could ever have fit into one room, practically transcending geographical distance, and changing the nature of conversations so that they can occur either instantly or asynchronously. Reference: Mockus, A., Fielding, R., & Herbsleb, J. (2002). Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 11(3), p. 309-346.

This article looks at another popular online collaboration tool in educational settings - the wiki. A wiki is a good choice for online collaboration because it is easy to set up, monitor and for most students easy for them to use. Deters, Cutherell & Stapleton's (2010) article looks at a study of the use of two wikis in particular, PBWiki and Wet Paint. Benefits when collaborating on a wiki are that can author, edit and find information very easily, making wikis especially helpful in the educational setting. Whilst this study overwhelmingly supports the use of wikis, they did identify a number of issues, which can be overcome. It is important that the wiki has instructor or teacher support. The teacher needs to set up guidelines, rules and examples for students to read before the wiki exercise begins. There can also be some technical issues with Wikis - but once again with good technical support these issues can be overcome. The study revealed that most students enjoyed using a wiki and the response was overall very positive. Not only did the students participate as part of their studies, but they could see how it would be possible to use wikis in their own teaching practices. Wikis are a wonderful tool that can be used in many settings and as stated by Deters, Cutherell & Stapleton's (2010, Discussion section, para.2), "in online learning situations, wikis assist students in learning new content and support them in connecting new knowledge with personal experiences".

References: Deters, F., Cuthrell, K. & Stapleton, J. (2010). Why Wikis? Student Perceptions of Using Wikis in Online Coursework . Journal of Online Teaching and Learning 6(1). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol6no1/deters_0310.htm

This article is a good case study on the benefits of using a wiki for teaching and learning. Since, wikis allow playful creation, flat hierarchies, simple rules, flexible scheduling and diverse participates (Ebersbach, 2008, p. 24-25) it is a great collaborative tool to use in teaching and Learning for students of any age. It would also be more appropriate for teaching staff to start implementing the usage of wikis or collaboration tools for teaching and learning as younger generations are digital natives and use web technologies regularly for communication and collaboration with peers. This article is also a good source to support the argument of using wikis for teaching and learning as it highlights and illustrates the support that students have towards teaching and learning outcomes, with the data illustrating that the majority of students found wikis to be useful for "teaching and learning and for collaborative problem solving" (Deters, Cuthrell & Stapleton, 2010, p. 5). Therefore, highlighting how a wiki allows for asynchronous use for students as many university students may study in a range of modes that include part time or distance modes, thus ensuring that all students regardless of time, space and location can collaborate and communicate both with other students and their facilitators for problem solving. References: Deters, F., Cuthrell, K. & Stapleton, J. (2010). Why Wikis? Student Perceptions of Using Wikis in Online Coursework . Journal of Online Teaching and Learning 6(1). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol6no1/deters_0310.htm Ebersbach, A. (2008). Wiki Web collaboration Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/content/q08xw7/#section=226612&page=1

Subject: How online collaboration has affected the software development industry Reference 3 Continuous Coordination: A New Paradigm to Support Globally Distributed Software Development Projects by David Redmiles , André Van Der Hoek , Ban Al-ani , Tobias Hildenbr , Stephen Quirk , Anita Sarma , Roberto Silveira , Silva Filho , Cleidson De Souza , Erik Trainer ABSTRACT Along with the rapid globalization of companies, the globalization of software development has become a reality. Many software projects are now distributed in diverse sites across the globe. The distance between these sites creates several problems that did not exist for previously collocated teams. Problems with the coordination of the activities, as well as with the communication between team members, emerge. Many collaborative software engineering tools that have been used to date, in global software development projects, exhibit a fundamental paradox: they are meant to support the collaborative activity of software development, but cause individuals and groups to work more or less independently from one another. The underlying issue is that existing software engineering tools, such as configuration management repositories, issue trackers, and workflow engines, separate time and tasks in concrete but isolated process steps. Designing tools based on the premise that human activities can be codified and that periodic resynchronization of tasks is an easy step reflects poor understanding human nature. We therefore propose a new approach to supporting collaborative work called Continuous Coordination. Underlying Continuous Coordination is the premise that humans must not and cannot have their method of collaboration rigidly dictated, but should be supported flexibly with both the tools and the information to coordinate their activities and to collaborate in their activities as they see fit. In this paper, we define the concept of Continuous Coordination, introduce our work

Review of article - Continuous Coordination: A New Paradigm to Support Globally Distributed Software Development Projects This is quite a useful paper about current issues relating to the collaboration of software development and though it does not appear to have been published it is still a well-researched review of the topic. It focuses on the developing technology and changing methods of collaboration when developing software. It reviews a number of issues such as coordination issues that may arise between different sites that are working on a collaborative project together and looks at why these issues arise when developers and designers are working with current versions of collaborative software. It further focuses on why these issues arise and then reviews some of the software that is currently under development that may fix these issues. The software that it reviews includes YANCEES notification service that is an automatic publication/subscribe service for keeping software collaboration coordinated; Palantir workspace awareness tool that is an enterprise-level integrated analysis platform that works on a client/server model; Ariadne that is a tool for the collaborative searching/analysis of databases/source code and the graphical visualization and tracking of such searches; the TriVis which is a utility for graphically tracing collaborative software development and interactions and finally WorldView which is similar to TriVis but can extend from visualising design models to high level representations of development team interactions. Overall this is a very interesting article about the future direction of software development collaboration Redmiles, D. V. D. H., André; Al-ani, Ban; Hildenbr,Tobias; Quirk, Stephen; Sarma, Anita; Silveira, Roberto; Filho, Silva; De Souza, Cleidson; Trainer, Erik Continuous Coordination: A New Paradigm to Support Globally Distributed Software Development Projects. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/dow

My topic is the collaboration practices of open source software development. OVERVIEW: This article compiles data taken from online OSS-management tool SourceForge, and provides an excellent overview of the features, advantages, and limitations of this particular tool. SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/) is an online tool that facilitates collaboration on Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Among the most significant tools that SourceForge provides are forums discussing each project, a file-release tool, a basic task management system, the ability to post documentation (eg. instruction manuals) online, and the all-important Concurrent Versions System (CVS). This article goes into satisfying detail of how CVS works and why it is advantageous to software developers, explaining the CVS process as follows: 1. CVS holds the current version of a program's source code, and allows developers to 'check out' (i.e. download) this source code so that they have their own version to play around with. 2. Once done, developers can 'commit' (or upload) their changes. If possible, the CVS automatically merges this code with any other changes that have been made since the code was checked out. 3. The CVS system retains a copy of all previous versions of the code, and thus allows reversion to previous versions, as well as the existence of multiple 'branches' of the same source code. The main advantage of the CVS tool is that it "[allows] multiple developers to be working on the source code at the same time without conflict" (p. 6), although teams are may be limited slightly by SourceForge's basic task management system which "lacks capabilities for resource and personnel management" (p. 4). SourceForge is one online tool that greatly aids in the co-ordination of open-source projects. Any software developer considering the use of a pre-made online tool for collaboration would bene

This article elaborates some overviews about data SourceForge which is from online OSS-management tool, with its characters, advantages, and limitations. SourceForge is a very altruistic platform to benefit people for the development of software tools. It is good example of a social networking platform that is geared towards producing collaborative work, which is productive. Its purpose is not entertainment or socializing, but its about bringing together people with specialized skills and providing the framework and tools to allow people to work on a product in a virtual workplace. I don't totally agree by collecting statistics on the software development process,especially one that is non-commercial and can potentially be worked on by any member of the public to be a totally useful study. Software was development which is not a static work flow. There are many standards, development methodologies, languages, platforms, not to mention the human factor that can make interpolation results of the data difficult. However, I strongly believe the success of SourceForge Projects is not the collaborative effort that causes success, but those developers to press ahead and work on their masterpiece. There are some projects that are very successful, but on the whole a majority of the projects are half started and incomplete. There have been many studies in the past to try to quantify the efficiency of Software Engineering and to date. There is no ideal solution to completing a Software Engineering Project. It is still a maturing engineering discipline.

This article reviews SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/) which is an Open Source software (OSS) development tool and provides free services to Open Source developers. By explaining how SourceForge collect, manage and apply activity data, this article points out the strengths and weaknesses of SourceForge as an online collaboration tool. An (2011) comments that the purpose of SourceForge is to bring "together people with specialized skills and [to provide] the framework and tools to allow people to work on a product in a virtual workplace". This feature is similar to Optimize Solutions which is mentioned in one of my selected articles: Optimize Solutions launches to help professional services organizations better manage - projects, resources, expenses. Both SourceForge and Optimize Solutions are collaboration tools with powerful functions for data management and user communication. With their network-based interface, distance is no longer an issue for collaboration and interaction among users. SourceForge deals with data and statistic; and Optimize Solutions manage various business resources, such as documents, images, and spreadsheet. While SourceForge is open for users to develop softwares, Optimize Solutions is used within an organization and external clients for business purposes. Although these two applications offer services in different fields, they both aim at enabling global collaboration and improving processing efficiency. I believe that with the development of information technology, especially online collaboration, such applications will be widely used in most organizations and for personal use. Reference: An, R (2011). Comment on Collection of Activity Data for SourceForge Projects. Retrieve from http://groups.diigo.com/group/curtin_net308?view=recent&page_num=1