Technological Support For Work Group Collaboration

This text discusses the emerging trend in product development and research that focuses on the increasingly important relationship between computer systems and social systems. The text emphasizes the significance of building tools to help people work together and the need for the identification of key factors within an organization to create systems more beneficial to users. Also contained are reviews of current research and discussions of both established tools, such as electronic mail and computer conferencing, and those newly developed programs that emphasize "work group" productivity over individual productivity.

This text discusses the emerging trend in product development and research that focuses on the increasingly important relationship between computer systems and social systems. The text emphasizes the significance of building tools to help people work together and the need for the identification of key factors within an organization to create systems more beneficial to users. Also contained are reviews of current research and discussions of both established tools, such as electronic mail and computer conferencing, and those newly developed programs that emphasize "work group" productivity over individual productivity.

The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research. The growing scale of science has been accompanied by a shift toward collaborative research, referred to as "team science." Scientific research is increasingly conducted by small teams and larger groups rather than individual investigators, but the challenges of collaboration can slow these teams' progress in achieving their scientific goals. How does a team-based approach work, and how can universities and research institutions support teams? Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science synthesizes and integrates the available research to provide guidance on assembling the science team; leadership, education and professional development for science teams and groups. It also examines institutional and organizational structures and policies to support science teams and identifies areas where further research is needed to help science teams and groups achieve their scientific and translational goals. This report offers major public policy recommendations for science research agencies and policymakers, as well as recommendations for individual scientists, disciplinary associations, and research universities. Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science will be of interest to university research administrators, team science leaders, science faculty, and graduate and postdoctoral students.

A comprehensive look at the promise and potential of online learning In our digital age, students have dramatically new learning needs and must be prepared for the idea economy of the future. In Getting Smart, well-known global education expert Tom Vander Ark examines the facets of educational innovation in the United States and abroad. Vander Ark makes a convincing case for a blend of online and onsite learning, shares inspiring stories of schools and programs that effectively offer "personal digital learning" opportunities, and discusses what we need to do to remake our schools into "smart schools." Examines the innovation-driven world, discusses how to combine online and onsite learning, and reviews "smart tools" for learning Investigates the lives of learning professionals, outlines the new employment bargain, examines online universities and "smart schools" Makes the case for smart capital, advocates for policies that create better learning, studies smart cultures

The authors of Igniting Your Teaching with Educational Technology are here to reduce the stress of learning how to use technology in the first few years of teaching. As fellow educators, we understand the challenges you may experience and have written this textbook to support you in your learning. Ultimately, we want you to be to navigate the waters of educational technology without it becoming an additional burden on top of everything else on your plate as a preservice or first-year teacher. We have over one-hundred years of combined, total teaching experience, in various capacities, grade levels, and content areas. Igniting Your Teaching with Educational Technology addresses six core themes that are of great significance when using technology in one's teaching. * Chapter 1: Classroom Management explores classroom management tools for classrooms of all ages of students. * Chapter 2: Learning Management Systems discusses learning management systems that are likely to be central in your student teaching experience and as a first-year teacher. * Chapter 3: Assessing Learning addresses measuring student learning using technology, using both formative and summative approaches. * Chapter 4: Collaboration Tools outlines tools you can utilize with your students as well as your colleagues and professors to contribute to the creation of a resource together. * Chapter 5: Selection of Educational Technology describes how preservice teachers can select technological tools and applications for various experiences and situations they may encounter as teachers. * Chapter 6: Professional Development via Social Media provides information regarding how to use social media to network with other teachers as well as to grow professionally as an educator.

Addresses a range of e-collaboration topics, with emphasis on virtual team leadership and collaborative engineering. Presents a blend of conceptual, theoretical, and applied chapters.

This book examines how digital technologies enable collaboration as a way for individuals, teams and businesses to connect, create value, and harness new opportunities. Digital technologies have brought the world closer together but also created new barriers and divides. While it is now possible to connect almost instantly and seamlessly across the globe, collaboration comes at a cost; it requires new skills and hidden ‘collaboration work’, and the need to renegotiate the fair distribution of value in multi-stakeholder network arrangements. Presenting state-of-the-art research, case studies, and leading voices in the field, the book provides academics and professionals with insights into the diverse powers of collaboration in the digital age, spanning collaboration among professionals, organisations, and consumers. It brings together contributions from scholars interested in the collaboration of teams, cooperatives, projects, and new cooperative systems, covering a range of sectors from the sharing economy, health care, large project businesses to public sector collaboration.

Groupware is a technology designed to help people working in groups to communicate their ideas more easily. While traditional technologies such as the telephone qualify as groupware, the term is usually used to refer to a specific class of technologies that rely on modern computer networks, such as email, newsgroups and videophones. Working with Groupware introduces the basic concepts and brings together ideas from various disciplines to provide an integrated approach to the evaluation and design of groupware technology. Key features include an analysis of the successes and failures of collaborative technology.

This book seeks to establish an interdisciplinary, applied social scientific model for researchers and students that advocates a cooperative effort between machines and people. After showing that basic research on social processes offers much needed guidance for those creating technology and designing tools for group work, its papers demonstrate the mutual relevance of social science and information system design, and encourage better integration of these disciplines. This comprehensive collection closely examines the variety of electronic tools being deployed to solve traditional problems in communication and coordination. Unfortunately, research shows that these tools have not been as successful as their designers had envisioned, partially because they were not always produced with the needs and goals of their human users in mind. The editors' goal is to entice more social scientists to orient their research around questions of practical interest to information system designers and to convince designers to search for the knowledge about social and organizational behavior that would make their tools more useful.

This book is an edited volume of case studies exploring the uptake and use of computer supported collaborative learning in work settings. This book fills a significant gap in the literature. A number of existing works provide empirical research on collaborative work practices (Lave & Wenger, 1987; Davenport, 2005), the sharing of information at work (Brown & Duguid, 2000), and the development of communities of practice in workplace settings (Wenger, 1998). Others examine the munificent variation of information and communication technology use in the work place, including studies of informal social networks, formal information distribution and other socio-technical combinations found in work settings (Gibson & Cohen, 2003). Another significant thread of prior work is focused on computer supported collaborative learning, much of it investigating the application of computer support for learning in the context of traditional educational institutions, like public schools, private schools, colleges and tutoring organizations. Exciting new theories of how knowledge is constructed by groups (Stahl, 2006), how teachers contribute to collaborative learning (reference to another book in the series) and the application of socio-technical scripts for learning is explicated in book length works on CSCL. Book length empirical work on CSCW is widespread, and CSCL book length works are beginning to emerge with greater frequency. We distinguish CSCL at Work from prior books written under the aegis of training and development, or human resources more broadly. The book aims to fill a void between existing works in CSCW and CSCL, and will open with a chapter characterizing the emerging application of collaborative learning theories and practices to workplace learning. CSCL and CSCW research each make distinct and important contributions to the construction of collaborative workplace learning.