UNIT 8 SEMINARCOLLABORATION IN THE WORKPLACE

SUSAN HARRELLKAPLAN UNIVERSITY

CM 415 Effective and Appropriate Communication in

the Workplace

Tim Berners-Lee

Thoughts on collaboration and the internet, 1999

“[The web is] an information space through which people can communicate, but communicate in special way: communicate by sharing their knowledge in a pool. The idea was not just that it should be a big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out.”

Issues to consider:

What role can (and should) technology play in workplace collaboration efforts?

What qualities must a group have for collaboration to be successful?

What technologies are useful for collaboration?

How many of you engage in collaboration in the workplace? Could technology improve the collaborative process?

Question 1

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Wikipedia in light of its intended purpose?

How might the Wikipedia experiment help us to think about the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration in the workplace? Can we learn anything from this model about document collaboration, for example?

What is Wikipedia?

“Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Anyone with internet access can make changes to Wikipedia articles. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference web sites, attracting around 65 million visitors monthly as of 2009. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 13,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. As of today, there are 2,928,013 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

AdvantagesAdvantages DisadvantagesDisadvantages

Always being updatedAllows anyone with

subject knowledge to post or revise

Available to anyone with internet access

Wider array of topics covered than in traditional encyclopedias (pop culture, politics, etc.)

Distance collaboration

Plagiarism—who “owns” ideas?

Anyone can post—may lack credibility or expertise in the subject

“Flaming”

Wikipedia

Questions 2 and 3: Collaboration at Kaplan

What forms of e-collaboration does Kaplan employ in its online environment?  What works well, what doesn’t work so well?  Explain. 

What forms of e-collaboration would encourage helpful group work for Kaplan classes?  Explain.

How does the on-line experience prepare you for collaboration in the workplace?

Kaplan collaboration—employees

Sharepoint sitesInnovations Lab blogConferences in Adobe Acrobat ConnectTeleconferencing

How are these tools particularly important when most employees are remote?

When do a company need collaborative tools?

Employees work at different physical locations

Need to easily exchange documentsDesire to improve efficiency, lessen e-mail

load and large attachments

FromFrom ToTo

SimpleInexpensive Locally installedCommercialSmall

ComplexExpensiveRemotely hostedOpen sourceLarge

What can collaborative tools be?

Types of collaborative tools

E-mailForums (bulletin

boards)Instant messagingTeam areas with

profilesDocument sharingShared whiteboard

Interactive calendars

Collaborating authoring

RSS channels to track team updates

Web and/or phone conferencing

Blogs and Wikis

Benefits of collaborative tools

Manage control of materialsTrack documents (when read,

downloaded)Create record of a project’s historyIncrease team efficiency and productivityBetter decision makingReduce time needed for meetingsAllow team members to know availability

of others

Assessing “workplace culture”

Frequency of communicationPreferred mode of communication (text,

video, voice)Need to share digital files and documentsTime needed to exchange documents Need for repository of documentsNumber of users and roles (who can see,

edit?)Degree of standardization

Workplace Collaboration: Drawbacks

Overly complex softwareLack of readiness by companyLack of governance, IT supportFailure to relay importance of project to employeesEmployees unable or unwilling to adapt to new

technologyUp-front expense for many portals

“Technology should be a supporting player in any collaboration effort, not the driver” (Fichter, 2005, ¶ 2).

For further research

http://www.creative-va.com/approach.htmlhttp://nfti.prosynergy.org/module6/

mod6slides_files/textmostly/slide1.htmlhttp://www.cisco.com/web/about/

ciscoitatwork/trends/tr_2009_01_article012_uc_comm_and_collaboration_benefits.html

http://productfour.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/collaboration-is-not-a-technology/

References

Wikipedia: About. (2009, June 30). Retrieved from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, on June 30, 2009, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About.

Fichter, D. (2005, July). The many forms of e-collaboration: Blogs, wikis, portals, groupware, discussion boards, and instant messaging. Online, 29(4), 48-50. Retrieved June 23, 2009, from Academic Search Premier.