ctw2007: A History and Issues of Social Collaboration

Part 1: Social Collaboration Technology Then, Now, and Beyond
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Alan Kay

What are social collaboration technologies? What are the issues surrounding the development and use of them? Bob Price discussed a history of social collaboration technologies and ended with a discussion of the open source virtual world project Croquet.

Campus Technology Winter 2007
Technology Leadership in Practice

Leading Change in Social Collaboration Environments http://www.campustechnology.com/conference/Winter07/sessionDetails.aspx?section_id=2160
Track Leaders:
Bob Price, Director, Academic Services, OIT, Duke University
Julian Lombardi, PhD., Assistant Vice President, Academic Services and Technology Support, Duke University
(absent, obtaining award at another conference)

Ask us to introduce ourselves and provide our definition of “social collaborative technologies.”

Limitations of the Interface
History lesson, images of what technologies were doing.

1963, light pen input. Quite amazing on what it is doing, so why are we moving slowly.
• 1974: Xerox Alto (track pad, 3 button mouse, and monitor)
• 1981: Xerox Star (flipped between desktop of Xerox Star & Mac OS10…wow, similar)
• 1988: “Walled Gardens” of AOL, CompuServe, and Podigy
• 1991: Gopher, first browser, access to distributed resources
• 1994: The Web: Mosaic—why was netscape successful


• Non commercial origins
• Distributed context easily accessed
• Distributed context easily authored
• Distributed context easily provisioned
• Hyperlink
• Scalable and efficient for 2d
• 1995: GopherVR & ViOS (3D movement ala Cyberpunk fiction)

Reed’s Law: The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

Collaboration & LMS
Have we gone past 2D world of online brochures; is that actually collaborative…are we just pushing information back and forth, not interacting.

Millennials

• Gravitate toward group activity
• Fascinated by new technology
• Intuitive visual communicators
• Good visual-spatial skills
• Inductive discovery
• Attentional deployment
• Fast response time

If we have all these technologies, why are we all in this room together?  Front page of OCW http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm “does not provide access to MIT faculty”

Is Google the context by which we provide information?

Social Collaboration = Web 2.0
Both Academic & Social Converge

Digital Image/Video sharing
YouTube
Flickr

GeoMapping/GeoSpatial
Google Earth
Google Maps

Blogs
Blogger
ELGG

Social Bookmarking
Del.icio.us

Wikis
MediaWiki
Confluence
Wikipedia

Game Based Learning

Social Networking
LinkedIn
Facebook
MySpace
Twitter

Virtual Learning Environments
SL
Eworlds
Croquet

Game Based Learning
Does it present us with a unique opportunity?
Sub-culture, lots of people participating (specially WoW)

Individual VLE (Virtual Learning Environments), why use them:

• Experimentation
• Something there
• Supplemental meeting place
• Content placement/scripting

Institutional VLEs, why

• Scalability
• Interoperability
• Meeting of functional requirements
• Avoidance of vendor lock-in
• Security/FERPA
• ROI
• Support for distributed knowledge communities
• Openness

Needed Infrastructure

• Scalable and cost effective
• Multi-platform/multi-device
• Open architecture and license
• Open and flexible development environment
• Integration with existing systems
• Simulations support
• Secure support for virtual learning environments

Current Needs:

• Conceptual model for a “metamedium”
• UIs for visual exploration
• Support for deep collaboration
• Resource integration
• Distributed access
• Common frameworks
• Open frameworks
• Cost effectiveness

December 11 2007 | Posted in Campus Technology