1. UNIT 8 SEMINAR COLLABORATION IN THE WORKPLACE SUSAN HARRELL KAPLAN UNIVERSITY CM 415 Effective and Appropriate Communication in the Workplace

2. 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.”

3. 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?

4. 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?

5. 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

6. Advantages Disadvantages Always being updated Allows 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

7. 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?

8. Kaplan collaboration—employees Sharepoint sites Innovations Lab blog Conferences in Adobe Acrobat Connect Teleconferencing How are these tools particularly important when most employees are remote?

9. When do a company need collaborative tools? Employees work at different physical locations Need to easily exchange documents Desire to improve efficiency, lessen e-mail load and large attachments

10. From To Simple Inexpensive Locally installed Commercial Small Complex Expensive Remotely hosted Open source Large What can collaborative tools be?

11. Types of collaborative tools E-mail Forums (bulletin boards) Instant messaging Team areas with profiles Document sharing Shared whiteboard Interactive calendars Collaborating authoring RSS channels to track team updates Web and/or phone conferencing Blogs and Wikis

12. Benefits of collaborative tools Manage control of materials Track documents (when read, downloaded) Create record of a project’s history Increase team efficiency and productivity Better decision making Reduce time needed for meetings Allow team members to know availability of others

13. Assessing “workplace culture” Frequency of communication Preferred mode of communication (text, video, voice) Need to share digital files and documents Time needed to exchange documents Need for repository of documents Number of users and roles (who can see, edit?) Degree of standardization

14. Workplace Collaboration: Drawbacks Overly complex software Lack of readiness by company Lack of governance, IT support Failure to relay importance of project to employees Employees unable or unwilling to adapt to new technology Up-front expense for many portals “Technology should be a supporting player in any collaboration effort, not the driver” (Fichter, 2005, ¶ 2).

15. For further research http://www.creative-va.com/approach.html http://nfti.prosynergy.org/module6/mod6slides_fil es/textmostly/slide1.html http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ciscoitatwork/tre nds/tr_2009_01_article012_uc_comm_and_collab oration_benefits.html http://productfour.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/coll aboration-is-not-a-technology/

16. 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.