Monday, November 05, 2007

Collaborative tools to assist in developing a professional learning community.... the search begins!

I have been racking my brain trying to come up with a solution for how to work collaboratively with my partner at work. What are the most efficient tools and processes out there? What are people using day to day that works for them? This post is intended as a kind of 'thinking out loud' exercise, to capture potential leads and traces.

Our needs:

We work in the office, but also at a distance. We (will) have laptops, but, our telephones are land lines, located in the office. We travel frequently, to joint meetings so far... We will be working on projects independent of each other, but there will be times where we will need to review each other's work or collaborate on work. We have a lot of information to assimilate about the diverse clientele we serve. We need to understand the impact of various stakeholders on the clientele we serve. Our solutions should be research-based. We are two people in a linguistic minority, who are part of a larger team of 16, part of the linguistic majority. So, where do we begin? :)

Some initial thoughts...

An inspirational video to start!

Browser:
I am not sure if my colleague has had a chance to try out this browser yet. I like it because of the strong developer community. Still some bugs and memory leakage, but, I think worth it overall.


Academic tools
To facilitate research citation. From their site:
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.
Tools for collaboration

Whiteboards:


A collaborative online tool from the makers of Basecamp. Clean interface, free option.

An online whiteboard. From their site:

Simple and easy online multi user whiteboard, start skrbl, give out your URL & start working together. Sketch, text, share files, upload pictures all in one common shared space.
Project Management:
A project management and collaboration tool. From their site:
Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.
A customer relations manager. From their site:
When you use Highrise, contacts and communication history can be shared across your entire company.

* List of Web 2.0 resources from Solution Watch


Ok... so, this post will be edited, as I add more potential leads. I am feeling slightly overwhelmed!!