XplanaZine

Let’s face it. We’re all looking for the killer app when it comes to sharing information and allowing us to work the way that we like to work.

Ray Ozzie of Grove Network’s thinks his company’s new Groove Workspace 2.5 is just that. It is an entirely collaborative space that features presence management along with great content management and communication tools, and integrates seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint Team Services. It is also an ideal product for developers as the new Groove Developers Kit makes it easy to extend the product to meet your needs using any SOAP-aware language.

What is so disruptive about Groove as a collaborative space is that it represents a shift from the way we’ve been doing business in organizations (and classes, and groups) and, instead , focuses on right ways to manage context, presence, and attention in all kinds of people and information-intensive scenarios. In other words, Ozzie has stopped being limited to e-mail and old collaboration models that were adapted to the technology, and has built an application in which the technology is molded to the way we would like to do business or collaborate.

This application represents an important development for education on the Web because, until now, content developers and instructors have felt severely limited by the tools they have to work with. We have been forced to adapt our teaching philosophies to the current technology (often without the best of results. Groove and other products like it promise an architecture that can power next-generation learning products that promote real collaboration and best-case learning scenarios.

Equally promising is the fact that there are some developing, open-source collaborative spaces that show great promise for education (we can have the promise for free!) First up is plone, a collaborative content management solution built on the Zope application server powered by Python. Plone provides a great community experience and is designed entirely for group collaboration and the sharing of documents and ideas. Zope and plone hosting are available at Zettai. Another open-source project making waves is SINAPSE out of the University of Oklahoma. SINAPSE is a PHP-based portal product that began as a student-developed project for designing and implementing a student community site at OU. Boasting more than 50 adopting universities for the coming fall, SINAPSE has quickly established itself as a strong player when it comes to campus community solutions. Added to that is their commitment to developing open-source learning tools that could have a tremendous impact.

The good news, then is that we don’t have to be stuck with the same old products that make us unhappy about the limitations of teaching on the Web. The challenge is working together as a community to make these tools what they need to be for education. I, for one, am willing to roll my sleeves up and work with anyone who is ready for a better tomorrow for teaching online.