http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Collaboration/Online A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and Collaboration and Online in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Collaboration/Online http://tc.eserver.org/35821.html http://tc.eserver.org/35821.html While Internet startups have had considerable success with crowdsourcing over the last few years, including with its more serious cousin peer production, it's only recently that they've focused on creating the tools and communities that can be readily consumed by enterprises. http://tc.eserver.org/35688.html http://tc.eserver.org/35688.html The world is a village – a village with nearly seven billion inhabitants, to be exact. Through modern travel and electronic means of communication, we’ve come closer to our friends and colleagues all over the globe. There’s no serious reason keeping us from working for customers in other countries, cooperating with partners on other continents, sharing information with peers from all around, networking with all the people we have met along our path during our entire professional and social life, something, that has lately become more popular than ever. http://tc.eserver.org/34700.html http://tc.eserver.org/34700.html Marking up paper is still the most common way to review documents, but online review is critical if you work as part of a distributed team. There are advantages to online review even if you sit only a cubicle away from your reviewer. Here are few tips for making your online reviews go smoothly. http://tc.eserver.org/34494.html http://tc.eserver.org/34494.html What if it were possible to manage the tendency of discussions to branch ad infinitum? What if it were possible to use those discussions to surface the important issues, identify the alternatives, make reasonable choices and, above all, provide a readable history of discussion that made it easy for someone coming along later to understand the basic architecture and find out why things are the way the are? There is an interesting coalition of technologies that could provide those very benefits. http://tc.eserver.org/34352.html http://tc.eserver.org/34352.html In his first column for Intercom, Rich Maggiani discusses the onset of social media as a significant new form of communication, and how the youngest generation is now setting the tone while Baby Boomers struggle to keep up. http://tc.eserver.org/34225.html http://tc.eserver.org/34225.html Twitter can be entertaining, and useful — and, really, who doesn’t like the illusion, from time to time, of lots of company? I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked. http://tc.eserver.org/34132.html http://tc.eserver.org/34132.html Provides advice on how to effectively collaborate with remote teams through communication, flexibility, sensitivity, and courage. He also points to the use of tools, such as email and videoconferencing, as a significant method for managing remote teams. http://tc.eserver.org/34102.html http://tc.eserver.org/34102.html When 90% of what you do for work is based online, there are bound to be some glitches, and not just the technical ones. How do you handle the inevitable misunderstandings that come with today’s rapid-fire digital conversations and communications in the workplace? I’ve put together a few ideas for how we can all minimize misunderstandings or at least diffuse the fallout. http://tc.eserver.org/33864.html http://tc.eserver.org/33864.html Coordinating a document review can be a tedious process. However, the task is even more difficult when reviewers work in another location and can't quickly exchange comments via paper. Fortunately, technology is presenting writers with new options for handling off-site reviews. http://tc.eserver.org/33629.html http://tc.eserver.org/33629.html We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things. http://tc.eserver.org/33557.html http://tc.eserver.org/33557.html This essay describes the authors' efforts to engage disciplinary calls for greater diversity through the construction of an international online community and conference, COMMUNEcation. They describe the commitments and goals of the community and conference, the construction of the COMMUNEcating space, and their encounters with disciplinary, geographically, and linguistically diverse scholars in their mutual exploration of global and organizing practices in their local contexts. The conference contributions and conversations prompted the authors to ask three salient questions around scholarly understandings of the Other and Othering practices of organizing and communicating across the globe—Where is the Other? Who is the Other? and What is the Other? The second half of the essay discusses these questions in detail and concludes with the authors' reflections on creating "spaces inbetween" through technology and an introduction to the multiauthored collaborative essay and conference product from the Scholars of the COMMUNEcation Network that follows. http://tc.eserver.org/33500.html http://tc.eserver.org/33500.html Using the framework of conversation analysis, the author examines the structure of interaction in computer-mediated team meetings, focusing on the openings and closings of the team's four virtual meetings. The author describes how the medium, quasisynchronous chat (QSC), disrupts the temporal flow of conversation and makes beginning and ending these informally structured meetings difficult. The author finds that the team, as a result, evolved a two-stage process for both opening and closing the meetings, which allowed them to make consistent use of certain linguistic and conversational devices to mark possible transition points for openings and closings. The author discusses how these virtual meetings compare to face-to-face interactions and some possible implications for the use of QSC for virtual team meetings. http://tc.eserver.org/33491.html http://tc.eserver.org/33491.html A number of smart businesses are realizing that the organizational characteristics that lead to their successes — such as agility, decentralized decision making, and fast growth — have made their Web sites unworkable through poor development processes and inconsistent user experiences. This frustrates any attempt by visitors to find meaningful information. http://tc.eserver.org/33396.html http://tc.eserver.org/33396.html Offers a detailed look at Eclipse—an open-source integrated development environment—and also discusses why it is becoming increasingly important to technical communicators in the software industry. http://tc.eserver.org/33397.html http://tc.eserver.org/33397.html As a technical communicator, how can you “stay in the loop” throughout the life of a project? Frampton discusses the ways in which TCs can contribute their expertise from the very beginning. http://tc.eserver.org/32627.html http://tc.eserver.org/32627.html As the computing world becomes more and more decentralised, people are realising more and more ways to free themselves from a single PC, work socially, and live a life online. This paper discusses how you can take to this new way of working, how you can decentralise your tasks and methods of working. It discusses the online applications you can use to replace your PC‘s programs, identifying both benefits and drawbacks. http://tc.eserver.org/31947.html http://tc.eserver.org/31947.html Chris Nagele’s run Wildbit, creators of hosted Subversion app Beanstalk, for 8 years virtually. He lives in Philadelphia and his team is all over the world. So, he knows a few things about virtual teams and shares them in this article. http://tc.eserver.org/31895.html http://tc.eserver.org/31895.html IT project teams often need to increase collaboration and communication, but they’re hampered by the cubicle walls and other physical silos they set up in the workplace. These physical obstacles force teams to have frequent meetings — which can be long and inefficient — just to keep each other updated. In this podcast, Emma Hamer talks about both physical and virtual workspaces that project teams need to increase their performance. She also outlines the rationale for teams to gather better feedback from users, project members, and others who aren’t domain experts. http://tc.eserver.org/31848.html http://tc.eserver.org/31848.html Check out seven tips that will help you and your team remain busy and useful when you have extra time or gaps between projects. http://tc.eserver.org/31842.html http://tc.eserver.org/31842.html Web conferencing without corporate support -- how to take advantage of ways the 'net can facilitate meetings in real life. http://tc.eserver.org/31645.html http://tc.eserver.org/31645.html This presentation reports on an intercultural virtual team project conducted by students in two management communication courses, one at the University of Delaware (USA) and one at McGill University (Canada). The goal of the partnership between the two classes was to enhance students' ability to collaborate across cultures using a variety of technologies for collaboration, a skill they need in order to succeed in the increasingly global and technologically mediated environment of work. Each team, which included students from both universities, compared communication practices in a company or type of business that exists both in the United States and in Canada. Their task was to analyze how the practices reflect and shape the particular environments in which the businesses operate. During the project they advanced and monitored their work through different technologies, including blogs, email, and a designated collaborative Web-based workspace, and they produced several genres of documents reporting their achievements. This presentation first analyzes the advantages, vulnerabilities, and faultlines of virtual intercultural teamwork as students experienced them. We then describe conditions that help teams overcome the risks of virtual work and assess how well we were able to create these conditions in the courses. http://tc.eserver.org/31484.html http://tc.eserver.org/31484.html Face time. According to the fourth annual survey of the North American workplace, from Netherlands-based staffing organization Randstad, those two words best describe the most preferred way for employers to communicate with employees. The 2003 Employee Review is based on findings from 2,826 telephone interviews conducted by RoperASW, making it one of the most extensive employee attitude surveys conducted in the U.S. “E-mail is far behind face-to-face meetings as the means of communication most preferred by employees,” said Joanne Reichardt, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs for Randstad North America. “In short, everyone wants face time.” http://tc.eserver.org/31440.html http://tc.eserver.org/31440.html Organizations with virtual teams have invested vast resources in recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce, offering cultural diversity training and providing the technology that makes the functioning of these teams possible. To ignore the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of these teams would minimize this investment. http://tc.eserver.org/31018.html http://tc.eserver.org/31018.html Web 2.0 technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous among younger generations of IT users and this is creating a new set of expectations about accessing quality information for business, research and academic purposes. The article looks at how this situation has impacted on the expectations of users of library and information services. Although there are solid reasons for standing by professional standards, there is little doubt that the next generation has a greater expectation around being participants in, rather than recipients of, knowledge sharing. How will this impact the status of the professional librarian and information manager, and to what extent should they change with this paradigm shift looming? http://tc.eserver.org/31005.html http://tc.eserver.org/31005.html Communication technology has changed the way we think of the workplace. It is no longer a physical location with equipment and personnel coming together in one place. Equipment and people can now be spread across the campus, across the city, across the country, or across the globe. At the same time the authors write that the hierarchical structure of companies is changing along with the geography. Employees no longer need to do specific tasks given to them by a local supervisor, but instead they can all take responsibility for the welfare of the organization. Each and every employee can have his or her ideas for innovation taken seriously. An interesting corollary to this discussion, not brought up by Tapscott and Williams, are benefits of the collaborative workplace, not directly related to the bottom line. http://tc.eserver.org/30711.html http://tc.eserver.org/30711.html Within democratic theory, the deliberative variant has assumed pre-eminence. It represents for many the ideal of democracy, and in pursuit of this ideal, online discussion forums have been proposed as solutions to the practical limits to mass deliberation. Critics have pointed to evidence which suggests that online discussion has tended to undermine deliberation. This article argues that this claim, which generates a stand-off between the two camps, misses a key issue: the role played by design in facilitating or thwarting deliberation. It argues that political choices are made both about the format and operation of the online discussion, and that this affects the possibility of deliberation. Evidence for the impact of design (and the choices behind it) is drawn from analysis of European Union and UK discussion forums. This evidence suggests that we should view deliberation as dependent on design and choice, rather than a predetermined product of the technology. http://tc.eserver.org/30139.html http://tc.eserver.org/30139.html Most of us struggle every day with keeping the lines of communication open between developers, subject matter experts (SMEs), customers, and writers. Sometimes you can circumvent these difficulties by simply walking upstairs or across the hall and chatting with the appropriate person. But what happens when it's not a staircase or hallway separating you but a very large ocean? The best way to keep an overseas project on track is to put together a writing team in the most convenient location; meet at least once with the development team; and set up your communication channels early. http://tc.eserver.org/30129.html http://tc.eserver.org/30129.html Technical communicators today often work with associates at locations across the city, state, country or world. Electronic tools can facilitate communication. At Unisys Corporation, we use Portable Document Format (PDF) files, networked DocuTech printers, networked and shared PC hard drives, and Microsoft NetMeeting for training. We have also addressed human concerns about sharing equipment, files, and jobs by helping people find a positive motivation to share. http://tc.eserver.org/29892.html http://tc.eserver.org/29892.html This article provides a review and analysis of asynchronous chat sessions used by students to produce a collaborative formal proposal in an undergraduate technical communication service course at Bowling Green State University. The author/investigator reviewed archived chat sessions of the two most successful student groups and compared their experience to the conclusions drawn by a previous study on collaborative writing in the virtual classroom. The current study represents an initial exploratory attempt to replicate and/or refute the results of the prior study. http://tc.eserver.org/29547.html http://tc.eserver.org/29547.html Video conferencing is the technique of meeting in a group over a network employing video and audio transmission technology and equipment. Armed with information about video conferencing businessmen, technologists, scientists and government heads started to explore ways to bring the world closer together and enable meetings of many people located in different parts of the globe. Video conferencing is the process of being able to see and interact with a group of people located at any point of the world at the same time. http://tc.eserver.org/29545.html http://tc.eserver.org/29545.html Video is a Latin word that means 'I see'. This technology includes, capturing, transmitting and replaying visual media. Video is actually the technique of turning a series of still images into moving images and the technology to do this varies through time. Video has come a long way from the black and white images that used to move much like a fast slide show just a couple of decades ago. Live video was made possible with the invention of the 'Vidicon', which was the heart of the video camera. This was first used in television cameras in the large television studios. Today, video cameras come in various shapes and sizes to match the work they are required to do. Small video cameras that fit into the palm of your hand are the most common and inexpensive cameras that produce very high quality images that can be stored on discs or video tape. http://tc.eserver.org/27049.html http://tc.eserver.org/27049.html It's supposed to make life easier, but e-mail has become a big pain. Enter the wiki, new software that could change the way you communicate. http://tc.eserver.org/26423.html http://tc.eserver.org/26423.html The focus of this paper is the ELEARNING RESEARCH PROJECT (hereafter referred to as the EProject), a project to investigate how virtual teams collaborate to solve highly complex or wicked problems. The EProject designed, constructed, and assessed a Web-based collaborative learning environment to support virtual teams of intelligence analysts. The mission of these geo-distributed and cross-disciplinary teams is to learn to collaborate in order to integrate knowledge from diverse domains and thereby produce solutions for wicked problems. http://tc.eserver.org/26419.html http://tc.eserver.org/26419.html With the growth of global computer networks, virtual communities have become an important new way for people to interact. People are beginning to realize that networks are not only affecting the way businesses operate, but also our everyday lives [7]. One of the simplest examples of a virtual community is online chat. Through a chat application, one can participate in diverse discussions with numerous people, many of whom are strangers. http://tc.eserver.org/25003.html http://tc.eserver.org/25003.html Open source development works because of remote collaboration; developers working together despite physical distance. With mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships, in-house developers are struggling with the same issues open source developers have addressed. Mark Murphy explains some of the challenges of remote collaboration. http://tc.eserver.org/24711.html http://tc.eserver.org/24711.html Challenges abound when a documentation team is based in two countries, works with software developers in four countries, and produces documentation for use by engineers in many countries. Differences in language usage, cultural perspectives, time zones, holiday schedules, and educational backgrounds are only a few of the difficulties to overcome. http://tc.eserver.org/24259.html http://tc.eserver.org/24259.html New software is released. The same day, a 1,000 page book is released that 'unleashes' the hidden secrets of the software. How did the book get there so quickly? This paper takes an insider’s look at a case history — the writing and publishing of the Lotus Notes Unleashed series of books — to show how the Internet is being used to provide more timely and accurate information on technical subjects. The described case includes assembling the writing team, writing the book, the editing process, and publication of the book, all done using the Internet and computers as a primary medium. http://tc.eserver.org/24170.html http://tc.eserver.org/24170.html A new genre of computer-mediated communication has unceremoniously appeared in the marketplace, promising to solve countless problems that you probably never knew you had. The new technology, generically known as broadcast messaging, represents the convergence of fax, e-mail, short messaging service (SMS), and voice messaging in a single, Web-based front end. http://tc.eserver.org/24119.html http://tc.eserver.org/24119.html Procedures for how to send a file as RTF or plain text in the body of an email. http://tc.eserver.org/23942.html http://tc.eserver.org/23942.html The rapid advance of the Internet, groupware, relational databases and search engines allows knowledge workers to come together and share ideas and information as never before. http://tc.eserver.org/23946.html http://tc.eserver.org/23946.html With the penetration of Internet technologies into global business operations, employees at every level are collaborating across multiple geographies. http://tc.eserver.org/23584.html http://tc.eserver.org/23584.html Although global computer networks have existed for many years, they have grown explosively only in the last few—particularly the one called the Internet. ARPANET, the forerunner of these network, was set up to aid communication between the government and people doing defense research in universities and industry. The network got a major boost in the late 1980s when the National Science Foundation created NSFNET, linking the five NSF supercomputer centers with networks at university campuses and the ARPANET. Continuing advances in reliability, speed, capacity, and ease of access have made the Internet an international medium for information exchange. http://tc.eserver.org/23166.html http://tc.eserver.org/23166.html This article examines many surprising problems that arise in the process of distance education using the Internet and describes ways in which instructors and administrators can solve these problems. The information in the article is based largely on the experience of educators at Utah State University who have been exploring distance education for the past six years by teaching a wide range of online courses via the Internet. As a result of this varied online teaching, we have encountered a broad spectrum of challenges to which we have tried to respond and from which we have tried to learn. The solutions described are generalizable to other programs using online delivery for instruction. http://tc.eserver.org/22971.html http://tc.eserver.org/22971.html This article will evaluate the accessibility of three types of popular synchronous communication tools: IRC, Web-based chats and instant messengers. http://tc.eserver.org/22795.html http://tc.eserver.org/22795.html Offers advice for managers of long-distance teams on working across time zones, accommodating team members' cultural norms, easing the difficulties of language differences, and nurturing team spirit. http://tc.eserver.org/22751.html http://tc.eserver.org/22751.html Social Networks and Social Software have been gaining a great deal of attention in corporate think tanks and discussion groups around the world. Review of progress in this area and interview with Huy Zing, a self-described, 'seriously addicted online community personality.' http://tc.eserver.org/22219.html http://tc.eserver.org/22219.html On-line collaboration enriches the educational experience, especially if instructors use software environments that support group-generated projects, products, case studies, and other kinds of academic deliverables. Such activities are not supported well by the standard 'threaded topic' discussion formats of e-mail and message-based conferencing systems. http://tc.eserver.org/21857.html http://tc.eserver.org/21857.html We've come a long way since the Pony Express, but delivering electronic documents isn't always easy. Here are a few tips to make sure they arrive intact and on time. http://tc.eserver.org/21513.html http://tc.eserver.org/21513.html From our case studies of technical communication college students collaborating via desktop videoconferencing (DTV) with high school students, we learned that DTV requires that collaborators manage a great deal more than text on a computer screen. Collaborators reliant on viewing computers as conveyors of text alone must learn new strategies for connecting interpersonally with people viewed on screen. Collaborators must macro-manage technology while they micro-manage dialogue about writing. http://tc.eserver.org/21101.html http://tc.eserver.org/21101.html Metcalfe's Law basically tells us that as you connect n number of machines you get n squared in potential value. So, with 2 machines you get a value of 4. When you connect 10 machines, you get a value of 100. When you connect 200 machines, you get a value of 40,000. People like to apply this idea to the internet. In particular, people claim that the strength of the internet is a direct result of so many machines being connected. I think that this is bullshit. http://tc.eserver.org/20969.html http://tc.eserver.org/20969.html When she learned that I would be teaching a course in her department, the department secretary made a mailbox for me and made sure that I received a copy of every memo and announcement distributed to the rest of the faculty. Other part-time faculty appreciated this service, so it became a part of the secretary's standard operating procedures. But I never received the mail because the mailbox was in Crookston, Minnesota and I taught the course by instructional television (ITV) from St. Paul, Minnesota, approximately 350 miles away. http://tc.eserver.org/19856.html http://tc.eserver.org/19856.html Online collaboration has become a major resource for students and professionals alike. Distance learning and other forms of online communication have become established norms for many schools and professional organizations. While online communication has countless benefits, several disadvantages exist and continue to emerge. This paper will explore the authors’ personal experiences as students and professionals, taking an in-depth look at online collaboration forums such as distance learning and professional collaborations as well as the advantages and disadvantages that each of these forums present. http://tc.eserver.org/19463.html http://tc.eserver.org/19463.html This presentation addresses the issues that technical communicators face when team members are in different geographic locations. Issues such as communication, team building, project management and planning, and successful practices that help teams succeed without regard to their physical locations will be discussed. The management of distributed teams, what obstacles managers face, including labor and employment laws, cost-of-living relative to salaries in varied locations, and how to conduct performance appraisals when managers and employees work thousands of miles apart will also be explored, along with employee perspectives and issues of change and collaboration. http://tc.eserver.org/18643.html http://tc.eserver.org/18643.html This multi-vocality and multiple authorship allows an enactment of some of the collaboratory promise of hypertext while web publishing allows decentralized publication. Finally, the CoverWeb allows Kairos to deliver texts appropriate to many tiers of readers. This issue's CoverWeb on educational MOOs includes basic introductions to MOOing linked to discussions of the pedagogical possibilities of virtual spaces linked to problems of administering MOOspaces. We have tried to cover a spectrum of possible interests as well as familiarity to MOOs in education and this layering simply wouldn't be possible in print. http://tc.eserver.org/15173.html http://tc.eserver.org/15173.html Introduces new technologies intended to lessen office reliance on paper and discusses their potential effects on technical documentation. http://tc.eserver.org/14697.html http://tc.eserver.org/14697.html St.Amant discusses the tendency of online communication to obscure a person's identity and suggests ways people can ensure clear communication with individuals of other cultures. http://tc.eserver.org/14051.html http://tc.eserver.org/14051.html Among the many complexities of power, economics, interests, personality, passions, social interaction, ideology, culture, and religion that keep politics both more and less than rational deliberation are those that arise from the dynamics of literate interchange, the historical formation of forums, and the generic shaping of utterances within those forums. Recent research on genre and discursive systems, along with situated cognition and action, suggests that the character of the local activity space is extremely important for what happens, what people think and learn, and what social consequences emerge. While the shape of politics to emerge in the cyber world is still somewhat obscure, by considering the forums of political interchange that are emerging on the internet, how they draw on previous forums and genres of political interchange, and the pressures that seem to be encouraging the heightening of certain elements within those genres, we may gain a first reading of some choices in front of us. http://tc.eserver.org/13653.html http://tc.eserver.org/13653.html A study of how a rhetorical perspective can help to improve the construction of virtual communities. By applying rhetorical theory to environments and communication, my research demonstrates that the relationship between a speaker and audience is in part determined by spatial cues. That means that the architecture of a virtual environment creates interactional expectations that guide activity within the environment. A major component of these expectations is the authority of a participant in relation to others; spatial cues help speakers determine the ethos -- or relational background -- of others. Researching this relationship across a variety of online environments has demonstrated that the structure of public and private spaces within an online community will affect congregating patterns, conversational habits, genres of discourse, community coherence, and social structure. In addition to spatial cues, representational choices also influence participants’ expectations of themselves and others. In my most recent study I have created an online environment that incorporates an @race property into the familiar litany of @gender, @description, and @research found in many educational and social environments. http://tc.eserver.org/11713.html http://tc.eserver.org/11713.html Working together online can be as productive and satisfying as working together face-to-face, and, under some circumstances, even more so. Virtual teamwork is definitely more economical, especially when team members are not all in the same building. With the appropriate selection and use of freely available web-based technologies, virtual teamwork can even make face-to-face meetings more effective. http://tc.eserver.org/10390.html http://tc.eserver.org/10390.html This paper reports an interpretive study of three cross-functional teams in a single company. The teams were virtual because each was composed of workers located in a small southern U. S. town and a northern U. S. city. The conceptual framework of situated learning within communities of practice guided the interpretation of transcripts of interviews with 22 managers and team members. The results suggest that virtual teamwork creates special demands that require workers to devise local practices for coordinating their work with remote team members. Through different combinations of remote and face-to-face communication, using a variety of communication media, the learning of work practices became situated in the virtual community rather than imposed by managers or specially designed coordinating technologies.