Group items tagged

"What factors are most important when evaluating a specific IT collaboration? To answer this question, the authors asked an experienced group of IT leaders to analyze collaborations with which they had direct experience and to identify the most important success factors for those activities. The dozen individuals who agreed to participate in telephone interviews represent more than 300 years of experience in higher education. The authors then reviewed the results of the telephone interviews and consolidated and summarized them to create a list of the 12 most important success factors identified by the participants."

"Learning Space as Creation Space The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment-flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based-and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space. The ability to rearrange furniture and technology quickly and easily will be highly desirable. Some project activities will need nothing more than comfortable furniture, food, and caffeine. Others will require sophisticated computational analysis and the ability to do rapid prototyping. Acoustics will be a concern and will need to accommodate a wide range of activities. It seems likely that such space will support more than one team or activity simultaneously. That will be a highly desirable trait, fostering serendipitous discovery and innovation. The ability to quickly and easily capture the group's activities and progress will also be desirable. An emerging class of powerful and effective collaboration tools enables project teams to save and store project elements, resources, concepts, plans, designs, models, and renderings-in short, all the "stuff" that a team might find or make."

"Open Cobalt Alpha is the first step in a long term project to make available to all people a free and open source platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual workspaces for research and education. This 3D multimedia wiki technology makes it easy to create deeply collaborative and hyperlinked multi-user virtual workspaces, virtual exhibit spaces, and game-based learning and training environments that run on all major software operating systems. By using a peer-based messaging protocol to reduce reliance on server infrastructures for support of basic in world interactions across many participants, Open Cobalt makes it possible for people hyperlink their virtual worlds via 3D portals to form a large distributed network of interconnected collaboration spaces. It also makes it possible for schools and other organizations to freely set up their own networks of public and private 3D virtual workspaces that feature integrated web browsing, voice chat, text chat, and access to remote desktop applications and services."

Hey guys. Just watched a live session online at Cisco w the developers of this system, still in development, but interesting differentiators vs 2Life, e.g. peer-to-peer, nested worlds, oh and its open-source. Thought yaz might be interested in tracking it.

"Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. In addition to the content of our course-which ranged across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, management theory, literature and the arts, and the various fields that compose science-and-technology studies-'This Is Your Brain on the Internet' was intended to model a different way of knowing the world, one that encompasses new and different forms of collaboration and attention. More than anything, it courted failure. Unlearning."

Mendeley Desktop organizes your research paper collection and citations. It automatically extracts references from documents, generates bibliographies, and is freely available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Mendeley Web lets you access your research paper library from anywhere, share documents in closed groups, and collaborate on research projects online. It connects you to like-minded academics and puts the latest research trend statistics at your fingertips.

Mendeley Desktop organizes your research paper collection and citations. It automatically extracts references from documents, generates bibliographies, and is freely available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Mendeley Web lets you access your research paper library from anywhere, share documents in closed groups, and collaborate on research projects online. It connects you to like-minded academics and puts the latest research trend statistics at your fingertips.

"Zeega is an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries, open archives and inventing new forms of storytelling. Zeega makes it easy to collaboratively produce, curate and publish participatory multimedia projects online, on mobile devices and in physical spaces. Zeega is in early alpha."

team launching a collaborative story (starting on Thursday 8 September) written in real time with readers following the story as it moves from blog to blog.

"Created and curated by RobinGoodRobinGood curates this topic from blogs, tweets, videos and much more: find out how!"

A blog recording work that Tom Smith at York Uni has done hacking around for solutions. Much if it is in Google Apps with scripts.

A few months ago, I discovered MentorMob (MM), which allows any user to create "learning playlists" to share or open up to other fellow learners who might want to add or edit the content in the playlist. The end product is the ultimate learning tool for students, especially when the playlist is populated with high-quality content, including visual, audio and interactive elements. MM playlists make sense because they "scaffold" learning in a very visual and intuitive way. The lists are simple to make, follow, edit, co-author and collaborate. "

An Open textbook and why it can be reused commercially.

Grainne Conole proposes 12 dimesions for better classification of MOOCs. the degree of openness, the scale of participation (massification), the amount of use of multimedia, the amount of communication, the extent to which collaboration is included, the type of learner pathway (from learner centred to teacher-centred and highly structured), the level of quality assurance, the extent to which reflection is encouraged, the level of assessment, how informal or formal it is, autonomy, and diversity. She then evaluates five example MOOCs against these dimensions.

A great blog on using Google Apps and wrangling it in a tertiary setting.

"This section contains lessons and seminar recordings that demonstrate how easy it is to collaborate on a project using Google Apps."

"You've likely seen the news of the Cisco Cius, our new, mobile collaboration, first-of-its- kind HD video-capable Business Tablet. However, you may have missed the demonstration of Cius yesterday at CiscoLive in Las Vegas. "

Hey you guys. If you can keep the marketing-visor firmly in place, this an ok demo of potential of tablets in education in general. BTW, you'z got an iPad yet? :)

This resource aims to help those making decisions about their use of freely available 'Web 2.0' interactive and collaborate e-learning tools. Each product, site or service described in these pages can be searched or browsed by a specific Activity or the usability/accessibility checks that it passed. The applications have short descriptions and comments regarding their ease of use and functionality. If you are involved in teaching and learning and are wanting to make more use of Web 2.0 services in your e-learning activities, or if you are interested in how Web 2.0 can supplement your existing methods, this section may be useful to you.

Enterprise immersive software is a collection of collaboration, communication, and productivity tools unified via a 3D or pseudo-3D visual environment. In this computer-generated environment, one or more people engage in work activities like meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The software provides a shared, interactive, multichannel experience through presence awareness, voice chat, active speaker indication, text chat, and many other features, often including avatars. The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present "if/then" scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The report offers guidance on how to: 1) ask core business questions to frame the discussion, 2) choose a research-and-demo, do-it-yourself, or combination approach, 3) identify requirements based on your use case, and 4) filter your options based on important limiters.

Over time the learner has been the explorer of knowledge, its accumulator and skilled 'access-or'. In the 21st century challenges and demands are expanding and changing again. Our new society's environment is one of rapid communication, action and change, of intricate social activity and a huge potential for new knowledge. What are the models of the learner for this brave new world? How can higher education create these models and support the learners who aspire to them? This paper postulates four models of the learner of the future: * the collaborator: for whom networks of knowledge, skills and ideas are the source of learning * the free agent: utilising flexible, continuous, open-ended and life-long styles and systems of learning to the full * the wise analyser: able to gather, scrutinise and use evidence of effective activity and apply conclusions to new problems * the creative synthesiser: able to connect across themes and disciplines, cross-fertilise ideas, integrate disparate concepts and create new vision and practice. The paper describes an example of these kinds of learning and considers what they might imply for the development of learning in higher education in the coming century

"The conference is part of the Re-engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project, a £1m initiative funded by the Scottish Funding Council under its e-Learning Transformation initiative. REAP is a collaboration across the University of Strathclyde, University of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian University. REAP is evaluating the impact of new assessment practices supported by technology at course, faculty and institutional level.Conference themes: Focusing on assessment FOR learning in tertiary education the conference has three themes to be addressed through keynotes, case studies and structured discussions.Assessment and the first year experienceGreat designs for assessmentInstitutional strategies (designs) for assessment"

The Writing Researcher is a new open activity which aims to bring researchers from different disciplines, institutions and countries together to share their writing and provide peer-feedback ina rather informal, friendly environment. ... As it reads in the blog we have set up for the project, The Writing Researcher: Inspiration, Creativity, Fluency  aims to: 1. promote and support writing as a creative, scholarly and collaborative enterprise, 2. encourage discussion and peer feedback in a distributed, shared environment, 3. establish an international, inter-disciplinary, inter-cultural peer network.