Virtual Collaboration in the Workplace

The future of a College Education

Posted for Sally L.

This article discusses the fact that going to college the way we know it may be coming to an end. The article state ‘that students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can't survive” 
 With education tools like Wimba and Second Life being made available for education and the costs of going to a traditional college skyrocketing do you think that the future of going to a traditional college is at risk?  Do you think ending the traditional college experience will benefit or hinder education? 

Myths Vs Facts of Online Degree Programs

Posted for Munib R.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn Alvin Toffler.

Virtual collaboration and the College Education

Posted for Amanda F.

University of Texas has joined the virtual world, on a whole new level.  The university is bringing together their nine academic and six health campuses into the virtual world.  Students and teachers will be able to take classes, hold meetings and conduct research all on this new system.   There will be 11 new systems implemented at the University of Texas, and will cost $2.5 million.  Some of the projects include a digital Calculus game for the University of Texas-Dallas campus to a digital grade book for the University of Texas-El Paso.  Students are able to personalize their profiles to fit what activities they participate in.

Collaborative Document Management

Posted for Ajay Y.

Unstructured content, like Documents, emails, audio, video files are integral part of today’s business. These contents are growing exponentially in every organization. The biggest challenge companies face is managing these contents to use them in an efficient way. It is nearly impossible to manage the complexity of creation, review and dissemination of contents to support business growth without a proper collaborative document management system.

 

Below are some of the factors which drives the need for deploying a CDM system in an organization.

 

-Documents scattered around different network file shares, intranets, employee’s personal hard drives?

-Cost of managing, distributing and storing papers is costing high.

-Employees are wasting time every day looking for business documents but unable to find it and hence recreating the documents over and over?

-Are you sure that employees are making informed business decision working from the latest version of a document?

-Unable to manage projects effectively and within time while trying to coordinate people from multiple geographic locations.

-There are no mechanism in place to store, secure, track, review, approve and publish documents.

-To capturing and share organizational knowledge and best practices to unlock the value of content to maximize business performance.

-Are you worried about increased regulatory pressure and compliance mandate to manage your business documents.

-Are you worried about how you would discover and produce key documents and emails to defend your organization in the case of a lawsuit or government investigation?

 

What other challenges which are not covered above drives the need for a collaborative document management system?

How would you prioritize the need for collaborative document management system in an organization?

Offline Blogging Platforms and related items

I wanted to post a blog today and, as I am tired of the fact my posting engine has a bug in it forcing me to manually code my hrefs (which gets tiresome very quickly), I figured I’d go find a new blogging tool before making my posts.  This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.  Let me explain.

The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching

I could probably assign The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching to every course I ever teach.  It contains an incredibly valuable lesson about learning.  That lesson at the bottom.

More Than 52,000 Students to Read Around The Planet

CAPspace or (Collaborations Around the Planet) is a free service that allows teachers to connect their classes with other classes in the United States and Across the World.  CAPspace and other organizations are putting on an event to promote reading among kids in K-12 grades.  The idea behind this event is to connect two class rooms that in different part of the word and have the students read to each other.  This is done by using video conferencing technology.  CAPspace also offers this service (again free of charge) for teachers to use at anytime.  All the teacher would have to do is register with the website and have access to some sort of video conferencing equipment. This event is going to teach a lot of students about virtual collaboration and about other cultures.
Matt M.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0477182.htm

Virtual High School (VHS)

There was an a segment on one of the local news channels a couple of weeks ago that talked about special high schools placed in less fortunate areas to provide deserving students with the opportunity to take advanced classes virtually. The students were placed in a classroom where a series of “course on-line” tools were made available (just like we have them at DePaul), the only exception was that their teacher was the one in the presentation. The kids in the classroom were watching another professor in another school in another classroom with other students in it. This in no way diminished their abilities to communicate questions or concerns with the teacher as the tools were in place for them to do so in real time with the teacher, and even engage in one-on-one meetings when needed.

Though it may be hard for me to see us moving to a full 100% virtual high school, I do see some benefits particularly with the issue of cost reduction. School administrators with a very limited budget can save on the cost of hiring another full-time teacher, and only have to worry about the initial cost of the equipment, most of which I am sure can be secured via donations.

 

Another reason why VHS mi It is all too common nowadays to see high school learning standards  brought down en masse though this might have some benefits of which I will not go into, it does seem entirely unfair for us to assume that all students are at the same learning standards. Thus some students might end up being bored and uninspired from current lecture, why don’t we then implement such a virtual classroom, where ABC  high school can have classes being though by XYZ college prep high school professors virtually! This would give those that need it at least the chance to be stimulated by their high school educational experience. So what do you think of the idea of a virtual high school, would it work, or more importantly can it work?

Michael

Source

http://www.govhs.org/Pages/WhyVHS-Home

http://www.imsa.edu/programs/ivhs/pdfs/FAQ-fall2005.pdf

Virtual Collaboration Tips

On February 13^th, 2009, BusinessWeek's Jim Ellis hosted a 30 minutes clip titled “Boosting Productivity Through Virtual Collaboration” and introduced two guests: Karen Sobel Lojeski, a professor of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University and the author of the book “Uniting the Virtual Workforce,” and Jessica Lipnack, CEO of NetAge a boutique consultancy focused on virtual teams and coauthor of the book "Virtual Teams". This discussion touched on defining virtual workforce, how big is the virtual workforce and how it is growing exponentially. According to Karen Sobel Lojeski, virtual workforce is expected to be ¾ of the workforce in the U.S. to be virtual by 2011.

The show also touched on comparing the work between ten years and now (economic, web) and the importance of trust in virtual collaboration. What is virtual distance (physical distance, operation distance, affinity distance)? According to Jessica, there are three simple things should keep in mind in a virtual meeting: exploit diversity, using technology to simulate reality, holding the team together.

The guests answered some questions such as how to select the right tool and how to get people focus in a meeting. There is more great information in this video clip.

I agree with both guests on changing outdated management models. I also believe that building trust is essential. How can you achieve that? In addition to that, from my experience on phone conferences, it will really help to focus during the the meeting is to have a visual slide that all the attendees could look at. This will help to follow what is going on in the meeting. Visual is a plus. Let me know what you think.

 Z.

 Here is a link to the Video

You could also take a look at 53 minutes “Leading Virtual Teams: Managing When People Are at a Distance” presentation by Jessica Lipnack. It is is divided by slides, so you could skip to the topic you really want. It is really good.

At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool

FACED with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many students begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube.

A year and a half ago I was having a hard time trying to understand a new language called Java. I was using Google to find more examples that could help me understand this new language since the text book was not a big help. But reading codes from other articles without any explanation was not a big help either.

I found myself using YouTube as a source to find some other coder’s examples. It was helpful. YouTube has experienced an explosion of all types of videos. Other sites like YouTube are also evolving from just entertainment into a research tool.

The amount of videos on the web and the amount of people watching videos online have increased exponentially thanks to affordable cameras, web sites hosting endless video clips, and the ease of uploading a video.

Then you think, is YouTube the next Google? Will video be the alternative to text?

However some content is not easy to present on video.

Young generations prefer video over text and this trend will eventually push a shift toward video. Video and text are not necessarily exclusive, they will complement each other. We think of video as something linked to television and not as a source or reference. 

Maybe its time to change the way we search for information?

Gus S

NYTimes Article