Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

SIM network superstar Sue Woodruff has launched a Facebook group for professional developers working with SIM. There are already 27 members sharing photos, links, and discussions.

The group is private, but if you have a Facebook account and wish to join just visit the SIM Professional Developers group and request to join.

Sue has been doing a lot with social web technology this year: In addition to Facebook, she maintains the blog For Your SIMformation and is active on Twitter. I’m hoping that we can co-present on these technologies at next summer’s SIM conference.

Andy Guess reported in Inside Higher Ed a qualitative study which “… found that students who create and edit documents using Web-based collaboration tools include more complex visual media in their assignments–and come away with a better understanding in the process. Another ongoing experiment finds, with statistical significance, that instructors can be more effective in grading students’ work if they record their comments directly into documents as audio.” The study also found that learners (in this case, graduate-level students) “… were ‘more likely to explain more complex concepts using a combination of text and non-text based materials. The majority of participants … expressed the view that it was easier to express themselves at a higher cognitive level when they could present material using multiple media sources.’ They also had higher levels of satisfaction.”

Guess’ blog post is available at Inside Higher Ed. More information about the study is available through the Sloan Consortium.

Source: “Research shows better learning when students use sites [sic] and sounds” from TerenceOnline.

Google has, yet again, taken a bounding leap forward in the online world. Google Sites is the new collaboration playground and it is open for people of all ages. I had the chance to set up a site for some people a few days ago and it went something like this:

1. Visit Google Sites.

2. Create your log in name and password.

3. Google will send you a confirmation email … so go check your email.

4. Once you get signed into Google Sites you can see who else is using this tool and set up your site.

5. Let the collaboration begin!

Click here to watch a demonstration or here to see how other people are using Sites. I have set up a few collaborative areas on here…so if you’re nice, I’ll let you join my tester group.

Apple’s new Mac operating system, version 10.5 (Leopard), was released to much fanfare last Friday. You can read all about it. There’s been lots of talk over the weekend about the souped-up interface and the built-in backup software, but here are three things I’m most interested in:

1. Updates to iChat: You can now present slides, photos, and video clips via iChat. (For you Windows folks, iChat is Apple’s client for AIM and other conferencing protocols.) Think of what this means for professional development and coaching! Say I’m a teacher in Kansas, and you’re a coach in California. Instead of flying out here to observe me, you can have me record my class and then we can meet later, online, and watch the video together. I can pause, fast forward, and rewind as we talk about the clip. We tinkered around with this feature in a beta release of Leopard and came away impressed.
2. Teams Server: Teams is a feature on the Server version of the new Mac OS. Imagine five or six of us are on a project together and need a place to collaborate online. With Teams, I can quickly set up a shared calendar, mailing list, blog, wiki, and file storage. It’s all web-based, so even team members using Windows can use the shared space. I think this will be much better than what we’re been working with in Moodle.
3. RSS in Mail: Apple’s built-in e-mail client, conveniently called Mail, now includes an RSS reader. People who’ve read this blog before know that I’m a big proponent of RSS, and anything that makes it easier to adopt this wonderful technology is aces in my book.

As I mentioned, we’ve been playing with a beta release for several weeks and I plan to install the official release on my laptop sometime this week. In the meantime if you have any questions about the new Mac operating system, feel free to ask them in comments below.

Sometimes, just sometimes, technology does things that actually do make life a little easier. Last night was one of those times.

We work with a web developer who lives in Canada. He and I communicate frequently via Skype. For those of you who don’t know, Skype is a free, easy-to-use audio/video/text conferencing tool with exceptional sound quality and pretty decent video. It’s also got some nice features like the ability to call traditional phone numbers, give yourself a portable phone number regular phones can dial (with voice mail), massive, multi-person audio conference capability, and lots of other things you may already know about. At any rate, it’s worthy of a whole post in itself (whole books have been written on it, for that matter).

Anyway, last night the Calgary-based web developer and I were talking on Skype. I was trying to explain one of those things that’s just a little clearer with an illustration. I recalled a web-based whiteboard I saw a few months back called Thinkature and suggested we give it a try. I pasted the URL into Skype’s text chat window for easy access.

Within about 60 seconds he was signed into his new Thinkature account and at the shared whiteboard I’d created. In no more than five minutes we’d each drawn a diagram of what we were trying to explain to one another, and in turn probably saved at least a day’s worth of costly development time. If either of us needs to be reminded of the decisions we made, it’s just a matter of going back to the whiteboard for a review. We could also print copies for posterity (or print them to PDF for sharing with others).

The best part of all is that everything we used was free, easy to use, and flexible. I like tools like this where I can pick and choose based on the learning and communication styles of the person at the other end–just from these two tools I could choose from audio, video, text, and a whiteboard, and mix-and-match as needed. Thinkature may be missing some drawing features its more established, expensive competiion features, but it is surprisingly robust for what it is, and the limited feature set makes the initial learning curve very shallow.

I recommend trying tools like these the next time you’ve got a meeting. Even if the person you’re meeting with is right next door, try firing up Skype and launching Thinkature. It’ll make good practice for the next time you need to interface with someone at the other end of the country.