Online collaboration

Today I have just introduced the users to onlinne collaboration tools. Even though these tools have been vailable for a long time, they have rarely been used for productive purposes.

Ususally when people have something to discuss or share, a meeting is called and this may result in one person taking centre stage with no contribution whatsoever from the rest of the attendees. I am saying attendeees because these people simply attend the meeting , there is little or no interactivity.

Online collaboration tools on the other hand allow

• participation in discussions from all team members
• contributions by shy members or those who are not so well groomed in public speaking without taking away anything from their contributions.
• participation in a dscussion without leaving your place of work which means you can multi-task, you save on transport costs and travelling time
• continuation of a discussion even after the meeting is officially over
• members who were not present during the actual meeting to participate and have their contributions taken into consideration.

These benefits are not exhaustive. Various tools for online collaboration include blogs, wikis, e-mail(I love the features that are on Outlook). Webinars, podcasts and webcasts are even more useful for collaboration as they allow for storage of a discussion, seminar or meeting for later use or reference.

I am going to create a blog for the library staff that I trained and with the enthusiasm they showed, this is going to be an interesting development not only in their professional life, but also their personals lives as they use blogs to

• get ideas from others
• communicate and collaborate
• improve their ICT skills.

The way forward now is to encourage the use of these tools for the benefits i have outlined above.

Another use will be for training purposes, eg training/orientation/communication/information dissemination between library staff and students using a webinar, podcasts, wikis and blogs.

I am also encouraging the use of RSS feeds, particularly for Faculty librarians to keep abreast of current trends and information available on specific subject matters that are relevant to their work.
I am really enjoying these training sessions as they have taught me to never take for granted the skills that I have as others do not have them. i have also learnt to never assume that because someone uses a computer everyday, they have the core skills to achieve their tasks.

To think that for over a year now I have assumed that people have the skills, only to realise the need for training later on is quite staggering.

My task now is to find ways of maintaining the skills that I have imparted and the current levels of enthusiasm.

I wonder how I will achieve that............................