Collaborative Learning Software

[Dave Duarte]

What software have you used, or would like to use, to support learning and collaboration in your company/school?

[Dave Everitt]

An afterthought: I think one reason Basecamp has taken off is that helps avoid the 'big plan up front' mistake of traditional project management methods. I've tried working Gantt charts and other 'up-front' plans, but they always drift away from the original. The agile programming movement got it right when it coined the pejorative phrase 'big design up front' to describe how the emergent, responsive processes of real human interaction and activity fail to be captured by top-down planning and hierarchical structures.

[MamaT Hoohlo]

Interesting.....I was sitting in on a meeting, just this week to expore the use of collaboration software in the company I work for... admittedly, it was the first time I had heard of the terminology , although I have a suspicious feeling I might have been making regular use of some of the tools; maybe even now??!? What exactly is Collaboration Software/ technology?

[Dave Everitt]

If you're using software tools where groups of people can communicate and share (like Huddlemind), that's an example. I'm not sure there's a definitive definition, since these tools can be designed for anything from co-writing documents (like Google Docs or Zoho Writer), educational resource sharing (like Blackboard or Sakai), to video conferencing, or combinations of various functions. I think one of the first examples to take off was Ward Cunningham's beutifully simple idea for the original Wiki - a site where the pages are built through harnessing the collective knowledge of a community (in that specific case, the programming community) - this was actually Tim Berners-Lee's original idea for the web.

A recent development are tools that work as normal desktop software, but can connect via the internet when necessary to collaborate with others online. Hope that helps! I'm sure others will have examples too.

[Richard Jamieson]

I am looking specifically for something to use as a learning content management system. The ones I have found so far are Moodle, ATutor, Sakai, Blackboard, and Scholar360. It seems that the first three (all open source) have just managed to win an appeal to get a whole host of Blackboard's patents revoked.
But that's not really my question - I want to know if anyone has used any of the three open source systems and how they compare to each other and to the two non-free systems?

[Steve Pieterse]

Richard, you could take a look at Instructor. . [pardon the shameless advertising] When Blackboard starting putting their pricing up.. it made it difficult for us in developing countries to afford it. I then as a pet project in my spare time took the best features of blackboard and developed my own e-learning application called Instructor. It has been in use at 9 different institutions in South Africa and has been refined over the last few years. I am currently redesigning the Instructor download site at the moment [read it is down - another one of those never ending projects]; but you can get in touch off-line and I can give you a copy. It is totally free; although I charge for support and customisation.

[Ben Jones]

I use Sharepoint for all projects and team work replacing/banning normal file shares (it is currently freely licensed by Microsoft under certain agreements) as a great tool to share info, docs, calendars and discussion threads (not that it should replace this of course!). Great integration with office products of course though you are joining the Evil Empire.

[Robbie White]

Well I work at IBM and actually am involved in selling IBM Lotus brand. The brand itself is focussed towards collaboration and offers a large amount of interesting brand new software which is top of the game. To see this you can see some of the Gartner reports for example WebSphere Portal vs competitors. The other joy is if you can show educational involvement then then IBM is often more keen to be involved and will try to support the school etc... The joy of it is that it has been tried and tested in many institutions and does have recognition. I know its a company I am involved in but the products seem good. What is your interest in collaboration? Who would you like to collaborate with?

[Josie Stewart]

Hay Dave,

I just got my entire Vega class to open a Gmail account so we could collaborate and share notes using Google Doc's.

So far so good, would you like me to keep you update as the class progresses.

Cheers

Josie

[Dave Duarte]

Hey Josie,
That's great. Yes, I'd love to know how that goes!
Ironically, I'm about to give a talk at Vega this morning. Perhaps the same bunch.