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CCCSAT Digital Satellite Means Access

E-Mail Use On The Rise For Faculty, Students

OFF THE WIRE:
- Colleges Get Bad Grades For Web Sites
- Growth of Wireless Access To Internet Coming At Hurricane Force Speed

The Road to "Natural" Digital Collaboration

Grant Seeking 101: Approaching Grantors For Your Technology Project (reprint)

Video Conferencing at The Museum of Television & Radio

David Pierce Faculty Technology Award


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Newsletter  BACK ISSUES:
 Volume 4 Issue 5 May 2000

The Road to "Natural" Digital Collaboration

If I told you that we were going to have a conference call, the steps would be natural. You would want to know the number to call, perhaps with a password or ID. And, in a few seconds or a couple of minutes, you would be in a telephone conference, focusing on the content rather than the technology.

It wasn't always like that. A decade ago, telephone conference calls were preceded by days or hours of anxiety, testing of phone lines and a learning curve that scared off many users. I remember leading a conference call in 1985 that required that I have two telephones to my ear, using one to communicate with the control center and the other to talk to fellow participants online.

We walked a road to get to the natural state of telephone conferences as collaboration. Multiple positive experiences, maturing technology, full compliance with standards and a price point that made the decision to use a conference call model a “no-brainer."

What is the road to the natural use of a wider set of digital collaboration tools?
Video conference technology is awesome, yet the logistics can be daunting. Almost every time that I schedule a keynote speech or meeting via video conference from my office, there is a flurry of testing and free-floating anxiety. Will it work? Do our systems like each other? Even though we are both using standards-based systems, the process is far from natural. And, for many folks in video conferencing sessions, they are distracted by the  technology.

Will it evolve to a more natural state? Yes, but it will take the same elements as the telephone conference call: loads of positive experiences, maturing technology, full compliance with standards and a friendly price point. Video conferencing technology is one of the great inventions of the 20th century but is often found gathering dust in the conference room of the CEO.

In the next 36 months, digital collaboration technology will explode on the scene. Accelerated by the popularity of the Internet, we will have the opportunity to have one-to-one and larger group experiences of collaboration and community. Watch for systems and services that will allow individuals and organizations to use digital collaboration for these core functions: learning, knowledge transfer, planning, meetings, selling, supporting, coaching, customer contact, relationship development, family gatherings, interviewing, shopping, litigating, researching, managing, and more.

The technology will come to us in both generic packages that allow a broad category of collaboration as well as function specific services that allow us to launch an event with a single click.

The challenge is to make these technologies work so well that they disappear from our radar screens and allow us to focus on just the relationships and content. We have to work hard to rapidly get to "natural" collaborations.

Vendors of digital collaboration tools must work together to extend their standards compliance and provide simple checking and setup procedures. I should not have to call a command center prior to attending a virtual meeting or classroom. We should be "collaboration ready " and have the ability to dive into a meeting or online relationship without requiring a "techie" moment first.

Organizations implementing digital collaboration will need to address the process issues of people working together with technology. There is a skill set to using a shared white board. There is a skill to delivering a speech over a videoconference system. There are wonderful and awful examples of a distance learning experience. We can't expect our colleagues to automatically adapt to new models of collaboration. There will be learning, coaching and modeling processes that must happen before we get to natural collaboration.

Just as there is a process of instructional design for developing instructional experiences, we believe that there is a parallel process of collaborative design to create the best uses of digital collaboration technology. We need to learn how to assess the needs of the groups involved and select media that is appropriate to the outcome objectives. We should envision the development of collaboration templates that will embody a design for ideal use of tools in a given situation (e.g. A template that walks the group through a highly interactive video conference for an employment interview, including application sharing of resume and job description documents.

Finally, there are new roles that we must invent and perfect to make digital collaboration really soar. Facilitators, community builders, virtual coaches and other roles will evolve that will make digital collaboration work effectively and naturally.

This is a great time to start the experimentation process. We should find teams within our organizations to lead pilots for leveraging existing and new technologies for effective collaboration. It would be great if the "owners " of collaboration technology were not techies but rather process-oriented folks in the Human Resources, Training, or Business areas.

Reprinted with permission from Elliott Masie's free e-Letter: TechLearn Trends http://www.masie.com



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