Collaborative Technologies

Drawn from a recent ECAR research study, this article addresses the importance of five CI technologies to various academic areas in research and in teaching and learning at present and how survey respondents think the importance of these technologies might change in the near future.

Live@edu is a suite of applications - mobile, desktop and web-based - to help students collaborate on campus. The resource links below include the Microsoft Live@edu Main Page; Microsoft Live@edu FAQ; and Microsoft Live@edu Blog.

The author advocates continued leadership and investment in developing and maintaining cyberinfrastructure.

Google Apps Education Edition is email, calendar, and collaboration tools right from the browser. The resource links below include the Google Apps Education Edition main page with introductory information; Case Studies from higher education custormers; Google Apps Discussion Group for Education Edition (EDU Administrator's Circle); FAQ; Google Apps Education Edition Terms of Service Agreement; and Google Apps Education Edition Administrator Program Policies.

This report is based primarily on a workshop involving 42 people from academia and industry.
The goal of the workshop was to share systematic knowledge about the components, characteristics,
practices, and transformative impact of effective VOs; identify topics for future research that will
inform the ongoing design, development, and analysis of VOs for science and engineering research
and education; and create a new cross-disciplinary VO research community to conduct research across
a range of important topics. A subsequent workshop brought together more than 200 practitioners and
VO researchers to discuss how to build effective virtual organizations, and some of the material from
that workshop is represented here.

This presentation will describe the identity management infrastructure of the UAB grid computing project, known as UABgrid. Its development is based on accomplishments of two NSF middleware projects at UAB, which focused on building NMI-enabled, open source tools for support of collaboration within virtual organizations that span institutional boundaries, are autonomous, and are collections of attributes. The middleware solution is known as myVocs and uses Shibboleth for identity management and attribution distribution, Globus for distributed computations, and GridShib to bind Shibboleth and Globus. UABgrid is now expanding its grid computing components to include metascheduling of jobs across multiple HPC clusters across the Internet.

Multi-touch interfaces are input devices that recognize two or more simultaneous touches, allowing one or more users to interact with computer applications through various gestures created by fingers on a surface. Some devices also recognize differences in pressure and temperature. Multi-touch technology introduces users to swipes, pinches, rotations, and other actions that allow for richer, more immediate interaction with digital content. Multi-touch devices and supporting applications offer diverse ways of visualizing information to improve understanding, and they facilitate new ways to foster collaborative creation, permitting several users to work simultaneously on a single screen.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Ning is an online service that allows users to create their own social networks and join and participate in other networks. No technical skill is required to set up a social network, and there are no limits to the number of networks a user can join. Users of Ning social networks have access to functionality similar to that of more well-known social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Various features allow users to read news or learn about related events, join groups, read and comment on blog entries, view photos and videos, and other activities as set up by the network creator. RSS feeds let users subscribe to updates from specific parts of the social network.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Thoughtful consideration of the issues relevant to cyberinfrastructure in higher education will help you pull out key points to discuss with specific audiences