METHODOLOGY

ASSIGNMENT

SUBMITTED BY

SARANYA R.S

PHYSICAL SCIENCE

REG NO: 13971023

TOPIC:

NETWORKING AS A MEANS OF COLLABORATIVE GROWTH

INTRODUCTION

Networking technology connects people without any geographical boundary. Internet provided a good channel for people communicate information and ideas. Nowadays, people can’t live without Internet. The Collaborative Growth Network (aka Co-Grow) is a group of independent marketing agencies working together to maximize business growth for themselves and their clients. Led by Peter Caputa IV, Hub Spot’s VP, Channel Sales & Marketing, the group is:

1. Dedicated to sharing and publishing marketing best practices

2. Helping each other serve clients more effectively

3. Advancing awareness and understanding of how inbound marketing delivers ROI

4. Helping each other grow their agencies.

DATA COLLECTIONS

Collaboration is viewed as producing results through the transfer and sharing of information, skills and expertise (Shrum, 2007). In other words, collaboration is more than interaction and requires ‘coordinated, chronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem’ (Rochelle and Teasley, 1995, 29). To some extent, collaboration requires a clear and shared purpose and also aims to producing something.

The above figure shows different levels of collaboration. Simplex interaction is the prerequisite in order to promote be full collaboration. The previous level is the prerequisite of next level. Social presence: the lowest level of collaboration, participants may only introduce them and show their presence in the environment.

§ Articulating individual perspectives: Participants start pointing out their own ideas. At this stage, different individual doesn’t aware other perspectives or ideas.

§ Accommodating or reflecting the perspectives of others: Participants start aware other ideas or perspectives. They make reference to others idea and providing feedback for others point of view.

§ Co-constructing shared perspectives and meanings: After the participants make reference to others, they started to involve the discussion and refining their perspectives.

§ Building shared goals and purposes: After the refinement of their perspectives and discussion, they recognize others aims and objectives. In this stage, they build shared goals and purposes.

§ Producing shared artifacts: Participants continue work on the same goals and purposes. They reach the level of full collaboration and produce some tangible solutions or results.

Meeting with overseas partners

In the past, if overseas partners want to meet, they must have to travel a long distance to meet. It’s very time-consuming and expensive. It’s also not efficient.

Best tools for overseas meeting – Video Conference

But with the help of the high speed internet, video conference will be possible. They don’t have to travel a long distance to meet and they can collaborate with each other without waste of time.

Gathering of knowledge

In the past, if people want to gather what they learn, they may probably choose to publish a book. An example will be the British Concise Encyclopedia which can’t be updated very frequently and can’t involve a lot of people. But now, collaboration platform like Wiki can help.

Education

In recent years, co-teaching has become one of the most widely used models of collaboration, found in classrooms across all grade levels and content areas. Once only regarded as collaboration between special education and general education teachers, it is now more generally defined as “…two professionals delivering substantive instruction to a diverse group of students in a single physical space."

As classrooms have become increasingly diverse, so too have the challenges for educators. Due to the diverse needs of students with designated special needs, English languages learners (ELL), and students of varied academic levels, teachers have been led to develop new approaches that provide additional support for their students. In practice, this is an inclusive model where students are not removed from the classroom to receive separate instruction, but rather they remain and receive collaborative instruction by both their general teacher and special education teachers.

Mobile collaboration technology might also be used for remote education. From one on one tutoring to large classes it has many uses. Homeschooling could really benefit from this technology as you participate in a lecture from anywhere in the world. Most useful you can record your classes or lectures and review them. Internet schools, including higher education, will most certainly also benefit from this development in mobile education. Though these methods are not widely used they are quite useful and most likely will become widely popular.

Shared initiatives

The educational networking to be used for shared initiatives between schools from different parts of the world without exposing the students to the adverse effects of such an access. Primitives like user groups, blogging, pages, and profiles can be used to represent one school to the other. Students from different schools can be put in the same group increasing collaboration and helping cross pollination of ideas, evolving new approaches to learning and enabling personality development of each and every connected individual. All this will be done under the supervision of the school at all times as every single interaction is monitored/saved.

Students can add their own content and their thoughts onto common message boards which are shared by teachers and students alike. It offers the power of communication without associated internet risks.

Resource sharing

Powerful features to allow resource sharing between schools are part of the standard collaborative infrastructure at every school. Schools can share Exploratorium catalogs, bookmarked data, digital media files, student projects, bulletins, academic material and a whole lot more with the click of a button. They can post web clippings, advertisements, involve parents in regular interactions with other schools and finally provide a modern forum for children to grow and prosper

Resources can also be shared with disadvantaged schools thus allowing premium institutions to share their wealth of knowledge and ultimately improve children from a less privileged background. It can be used as a supplemental learning tool at home for students and actively encourage parents to play a more participatory role with the school.

Interactive relationships

http://www.tidaldata.com/exploratorium/img/interactive_rel.png

One of the most significant additions to a school is the ability to have live communication with other schools, parents, individuals, associate members, external student groups, etc.

Imagine a parent having a video chat interaction on his/her phone with a teacher/student using conferencing mechanisms that are inbuilt. EKC integrates with instant conference and provides a variety of ways to communicate ideas, programs, models and platforms to other interested parties.

Typically the following activities would be made possible with our Collaborative framework:

· Video conferencing for distance learning, combined projects, performance appraisals, etc

· Live blogging and chatting between students, teachers and parents across geographical boundaries

· Allow authenticated users to have pre-fixed sessions of communication and data sharing

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), the infrastructure to support email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony.

Telecommuting

Remote work is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videoconferencing, and Voice over IP (VOIP). It can be efficient and useful for companies as it allows workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As broadband Internet connections become more commonplace, more and more workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate intranet and internal phone networks.

Social networking and entertainment

Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book vacations and to find out more about their interests. People use chat, messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had pen pals. The Internet has seen a growing number of Web desktops, where users can access their files and settings via the Internet.

Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace have created new ways to socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide variety of information to pages, to pursue common interests, and to connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to allow communication among existing groups of people. Sites like LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections. YouTube and Flicker specialize in users' videos and photographs.

The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Today, many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos; short cartoons in the form of Flash movies are also popular. Over 6 million people use blogs or message boards as a means of communication and for the sharing of ideas. The Internet pornography and online gambling industries have taken advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source of advertising revenue for other websites. Although many governments have attempted to restrict both industries' use of the Internet, in general this has failed to stop their widespread popularity.

Business impacts

Companies such as Jive Software and IBM have recently been doing research to see how social networking can impact enterprise networks. Different companies have embraced social networking and they are creating their own internal social networking sites. IBM is one example and they have created the Beehive research project, based on their Lotus Connections product. Another example is Atos, which is deploying it’s in house blue Kiwi product across all 76,000 employees to achieve its Zero Email ambition by the end of 2013. Many companies are encouraging employees to use their social networks so they can connect with other employees, help people socialize when they take a break, or even help contribute to other work-related issues. Some companies are even joining typical social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace to gain more clients, communicate with their clients, or target individuals based on their likes. These companies want to gain the trust of their clients.

Many companies are starting to implement social networks to promote collaboration amongst their employees. Vendors are now starting to use this as a way to help out the different companies. Some companies are starting to teach their employees about cloud computing and Sass. These new technologies are being added to the enterprise social networks. These networks are being implemented to get employees collaborating and sharing tips and ideas about how to improve the workplace. Some social networks are homegrown systems that are built internally. Companies are using social networks to trade information amongst team members or other people who are part of the company. Sometimes this might also mean trading documents in real time. Based on research by Gartner (2010), 50% of enterprises will be using some sort of social network by 2012.

The potential issues in online collaboration.

The new collaborative networking technologies offered a lot of advantages for online collaboration. But there are still some potential issues that may affect online collaboration. These issues will be defined as the noise in the previous communication model of Internet example.
Since the nature of Internet, it makes information can be easily distributed around the world.

Some causes of information overload:

§ A rapidly increasing rate of new information being produced

§ The ease of duplication and transmission of data across the Internet

§ An increase in the available channels of incoming information (e.g. telephone, e-mail, instant messaging, RSS, discussion forum)

§ Large amounts of historical information to dig through

E.g. when email is the easiest way to distribute information, more and more unrelated information will flow to your email inbox. In term of collaborative discussion forum, if there is bulk of unrelated threads, there will not have any constructive discussion. It directly affects the collaboration experience in the platform.

Reliability of Information
The reliability of online collaborative work is also underdetermined. Since the high availability of online wiki or other collaboration platform, many people are gained access to add, edit or remove the information in the collaboration platform. Inaccurate information may be produced due to the flaw of online platform.

CONCLUSION

The different networking technologies which enable us collaborate in an online environment. For example: By using Media Wiki or Google Docs, different ideas or contributions can be summarized; the level of co-constructing shared perspectives and meanings and building shared goals and purpose can be easy archived.

By using Wikipedia, different products of collaboration can launched easily which can complete the level of producing shared artifacts. This level makes collaboration product can be reused by others and reach the level of full collaboration. We can see that different networking technologies are facilitating us to reach different level of collaboration. The human factor also make a considerable impact on how networking technology promoting collaboration. The acceptance of new technology will change how people devote their effort on an online collaboration environment. Therefore, human factor should be considered in coming discussion on collaboration. We can conclude that networking technologies offer us new channel to communicate; these new channels improve our communication. At the same time, the improved communication channels promote us to reach higher level of collaboration.

REFERENCES

1. www.wikipedia.org

2. www.collaborativegrowthnetwork.com

3. www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policy funding.

4. Essentials of educational technology by J C Agarwaal