ACTWAN - Aligning Collaboration Tools With Academic Needs

The Collaboration Tools project objective is to provide a report on the current use, successes and challenges of collaboration tools in higher education, from both the instructors’ and students’ viewpoints. The group will also research trends and forecast the use of collaboration tools for the purpose of developing a vision statement to assist DoIT managers in planning for support and services of these tools.

What is Collaboration?

Collaboration gives people the opportunity to communicate, to collectively author, edit and review materials and to develop a community of learners who are working toward a shared outcome. To this end, there are many collaborative activities such as peer review, sharing experiences, and lab work which can enable this process.

Collaboration tools allow people with a common interest to work in partnership in a shared space to exchange information, which may include group work on documents and/or discussion of ideas. Examples of these tools are: email, whiteboards, wikis, blogs and social networking environments.