2008 Horizon Report

One Year or Less: Collaboration Webs

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
In today’s workplace, be it in education or industry, it is not unusual for a typical work week to include a virtual meeting or conference. Tools to support collaborative online work are easy to find and uncomplicated to use. Any networked computer can serve as a multi-function videoconference room, a gateway to a gathering in a virtual world, or a joint workstation where several people can author the same documents together. Virtual collaboration has been made increasingly seamless by a host of complimentary developments in networking infrastructure, social networking tools, web applications, and collaborative workspaces.

Overview

As the typical educator’s network of contacts has grown to include colleagues who might live and work across the country, or indeed anywhere on the globe, it has become common for people who are not physically located near each other to collaborate on projects. In classrooms as well, joint projects with students at other campuses or in other countries is more and more commonplace as a strategy to expose learners to a variety of perspectives. Fueling these sorts of contacts, of course, is the Internet, the very existence of which has done much to dissipate the constraints once imposed by distance.

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Indeed, web-based tools and collaborative work-spaces that support a range of activities from productivity-type tasks to fully fledged virtual conferences have been available for some time, but these platforms have often been expensive. Developments in two key areas, however, have resulted in tools that are now quite inexpensive and often free. These tools require no special installation or setup, are designed to be used within a web browser, produce materials that can be easily shared, and offer a convenience and flexibility that can make virtual collaborations both simple and highly productive.

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The first area of development has been an explosion of straightforward tools that allow people to break work into small easy-to-accomplish pieces that a team of people can work on together or in parallel. Examples are tasks like writing a document, building a budget, assembling a presentation, or creating a digital story. Webware suites like Zoho Office (www.zoho.com) and Google Docs (docs.google.com) offer the most common features that off-the-shelf packages provide, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and more, without the need to buy or install any software. Significantly, the ability to share documents and collaborate on content creation is built into the core functionalities of these toolsets.

A wide variety of webware applications exist to manage the creation and workflow of rich media projects as well (see www.splashup.com for photos and www.jumpcut.com for videos, to name just two examples); capture a sketch with audio narration (www.sketchcast.com); or publish presentations and slideshows (www.slideshare.net; www.slide.com).

The second area of development has been in online collaborative workspaces that serve as a hub where a group of people can easily work, share resources, capture ideas, and even socialize. 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. The most popular of these tools are highly flexible and can be adapted to almost any project. At the same time, these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources, often quite transparently. Examples include do-it-yourself social networks like Ning (www.ning.com); sharable personalized start pages that are “pagecast” shared, in other words—from services like Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) or Pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com); and social networks like Facebook (www.facebook.com).

Taken together, these tools are fostering collaboration webs that span almost every discipline. It is increasingly common to see custom workplaces for projects and collaborations. They are easy to create, and they allow people to jointly collaborate on complex projects using low-cost, simple tools.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

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.

The bar for widespread participation is very low, since the software to support virtual collaboration is low cost or free, and available via a web browser. Students can access the same materials from any computer, whether it is theirs or one in a computer lab. Support needs are greatly reduced as nothing needs to be installed or upgraded.

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, including Flickr, Twitter, MySpace or Facebook, news and weather feeds, Del.icio.us, blog feeds and more. For example, a custom course workspace could include a calendar widget populated with data from the school’s online calendaring system, an RSS feed that displays students’ and professors’ recent blog posts or Twitter updates, a course-created tag cloud on Del.icio.us, a Flickr badge featuring related photos, and a whiteboard widget where course members can leave messages for one another. All the information the group needs can be accessed and contributed to by any of them in a virtual space accessible from any computer.

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. Complementary webware tools make it possible for students to easily incorporate multimedia into their work. Videos, audio clips, and images can all be edited online using free tools like those mentioned above, then easily published and shared using any of a number of online services.

As new work is blogged, podcast, or posted, a portfolio page created with these tools will automatically update with the most current content. 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.

A sampling of applications of collaboration webs across disciplines includes the following:

• Art. Two art appreciation courses at Arkansas State University pull in current events, student work, topical blog posts by art scholars and researchers, and more. Instead of the campus LMS, the courses use Facebook as their primary interaction and information tool.
• Business. 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.
• Educational Technology. 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.
• Multi-Disciplinary Studies. 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. Students use the site to share information about each other, collect resources and information, showcase multimedia clips and other class projects, provide access to course materials, and participate in forums used to support group discussions and interactions.

Examples of Collaboration Webs

The following links provide examples of collaboration webs and the tools that support them.

Digital Entrepreneurship Community
digent.rit.edu
This community, created by business faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is comprised of students, faculty, professionals, venture capitalists, and other interested parties from around the world. To visit the community page, use the login “digentguest@gmail.com” and the password “ritdigent” (or your own Ning identity).

DIVA
diva.sfsu.edu
San Francisco State University’s Digital Information Virtual Archive (DIVA) blends repository services, content development tools, personal file management and sharing capabilities, and private workspaces to allow faculty to collaborate on course materials and leverage one another’s work.

Google Apps at Arizona State University
www.asu.edu/emailsignup/
Arizona State University offers Google applications, including mail, calendaring, and chat to its 65,000 students.

Melbourne 2051 at Victoria University
www.melbourne2051.com
Victoria University’s Melbourne 2051 project combines traditional writing with digital storytelling in the form of a virtual world setting built by students.

National Forum on Canadian History
www.pageflakes.com/cnhs/14568889
The National Forum on Canadian History is a one-day event with its own pagecast, including documents, photos and videos.

Skoolaborate
www.skoolaborate.com
Skoolaborate is a global project that uses a mix of technologies (blogs, LMS, wikis and virtual worlds) for collaborative learning.

For Further Reading

The following articles and resources are recommended for those who wish to learn more about collaboration webs.

Educational Uses of Google Docs & Spreadsheets
www.tltgroup.org/FridayLive/20070309Google DocsEdUsesResources.htm
(Steve Gilbert, Cynthia Russell, TLT-SWG, March 8, 2007.) This resource page by The Teaching, Learning and Technology Group features materials about the educational use of Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

MPK20: Sun’s Virtual Workplace
research.sun.com/projects/mc/mpk20.html
(Sun Microsystems Website, retrieved November, 2007.) This page describes Sun’s virtual workplace (MPK20), how it came about, and how it is used within the company.

Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network
www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/24/9-ways-to-build-your-own-social-network
(Mark Hendrickson, TechCrunch, July 24, 2007.) This blog post describes nine tools that can be used to build collaborative workspaces.

Pageflakes, Netvibes Take on Social Networks: What Chance Do They Have?
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pageflakes_ netvibes_take_on_social_networks.php
(Richard MacManus, Read/Write Web, July 22, 2007.) This blog post discusses the emergence of services like Pageflakes and Netvibes and compares them to large social networking sites like Facebook.

Using Pageflakes as a Student Portal
weblogg-ed.com/2006/using-pageflakes-as-student-portal/
(Will Richardson, weblogg-ed, November 21, 2007.) This blog post describes how to set up a Pageflakes portal for educational purposes.

What’s Driving Adoption of Rich Internet Applications?
blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=634
(Ryan Stewart, The Universal Desktop, November 19, 2007.) This blog post examines possible reasons why webware apps are growing in popularity and use.

del.icio.us: Collaboration Webs
del.icio.us/tag/hz08+virtualcollab
(Horizon Advisory Board and Friends, 2007.) Follow this link to find additional resources tagged for this topic and this edition of the Horizon Report. To add to this list, simply tag resources with “hz08” and “virtualcollab” when you save them to del.icio.us.