Week 4: Readings

Week 3 was an off week for articles.. here is a summary of Week 4's readings:


Many forms of e-collaboration
The author presents the many different ways to build a collaborative work place. At the beginning of the article he outlines the three fundamentals of collaborative tools. They are
• A way to communicate
• A mechanism to share documents
• Some means to discover other members of the community

He then goes on to discuss when your office or working group needs an online collaboration tool. He outlines three of the most common tasks that an online collaboration tool can help manage more effectively. They are:
• Manage the control and access to your materials
• Track what was posted when and who has reviewed it
• Make your project debriefing meeting based on a record of what happened during the project life cycle

He also discussed how online collaboration tools can help make your team more effective and efficient by having a centralized repository of documents and information so a team doesn’t have to go searching in multiple places.

Finally a comprehensive list of types of collaborative tools were listed. I was familiar with all of them so I will only list them. Some of the types discussed were:
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Portals
• Groupware
• Discussion Boards
• Instant Messaging
• And of course… email


Finally the article discussed the importance of defining the r requirements your team has in order to choose the correct collaborative technology. The major requirements were:
• How frequently do people need to communicate?
• What types of communication is preferred – asynch vs. synch
• What access is need to previous communications
• How often do groups want to share documents and other digital objects?


7 Things you should know about Wikis
This is simple to summarize. Here are the seven things:
1. What is it (a collaborative page that can be viewed and updated by members of a community)
2. Who’s doing it? (basically, everyone who needs to)
3. How does it work? (over view of the technology )
4. Why is it significant? (it’s a powerful and flexible collaborative tool)
5. What are the Downsides? (integrity of info. Structure can be challenging. Collaborative bias)
6. Where is it going? (article states they show great potential)
7. What are the implications teaching and learning? (Focuses on the educational use of wikis)

Grassroots KM
This is a very interesting Gartner article on KM in the enterprise and looks at current trends and makes future predictions of KM in enterprise. Basically the article notes a trend (as of it’s writing in 2003) of enterprises moving away from large enterprise controlled KMS’s to “grassroots” KMS’s run by individual business units inside an enterprise. The idea is that each business unit might have individual needs for a KMS solution and therefore one large KMS in the enterprise might not suit their needs, however multiple different KMS’s across an organization may help each individual until maximize their KM needs. The article goes on to predict that this trend will continue over time and that enterprises will start to encourage each business until to have it’s own KMS solution.


Personal toolkit
This article was moderately helpful. The real key to the article was the chart that laid out different types of technologies that can be helpful for different needs and uses. The chart was arranged by principles, processes, values, skills, and tools. The different principles listed were: accessing, evaluating, organizing, analyzing, conveying, collaborating, andsecuring,

IEEE Spectrum Wikipeida review
The IEEE article outlines how Wikipedia works and how relevant and accurate its information is or could be. To me the major finding was in the Brittanica vs. Wikipedia showdown. A study done by the journal Nature discovered 3 errors per Brittanica article and 4 per Wikipedia article. However the IEEE article goes on to caution to not just flat out trust a wikipedia post, it does mention that Wikipedia can be quite useful.

For me personally I’ve found Wikipedia to be a great first step/resource. I think the greatest strength is in it’s references section. Often times Wikipedia can point me to a great list of references about a topic, which can help me to further learn about it instead of me trying to compile all of the information myself.