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O - How should organizations respond to the rapid, mobile, collaborative tools arriving on the internet almost daily. Should organizations be concentrating on providing,mandating or controlling information and communication technologies at all?

Organizations

Organizations are forced to consider collaboration tools and the affect that it is having on how we learn and work in today's environment. However, there is always change and organization must keep their purpose and goals in mind when adopting new collaborative tools

First you begin with the organizational goals. Once that is underway a quality assurance process can help support those goals as new and innovative technologies come on the market, external factors like what the other stake holders are using and what the expectations are within a culture around who has what kind of technology resources and how they are using it. Inglis describes bench marking "involves understanding the organizations own processes,comparing a set of products or services against the best that can be found with the relevant industry sector (p.2) Inglis goes on to describe the steps included :anaylizing the process of others, comparing your performance with others, implementing procedures to close the gap (inglis, O'reagain and Keegan 2000) Good business practices are not put on hold no matter how quickly new technology comes onto the market.

BCIT for exampl have a Learning Resource Unit (LRU) that is mandated to do exactly this along with other functions. As an example BCIT has moved from Moodle to Desire2Learn as an on-line management system. To be truly successful the LRU needs to collaborate with the entire BCIT community and if someone such as myself wants to deploy a new application such as Google Wave into my teaching environment the framework and process should allow some form of experimentation. This leads to further evaluation and adoption by other instructors. Note that institutions such as BCIT in general have an open policy about computer and software usage as restrictions quench creativity. This does not mean there are no restrictions as all participants in the Internet have policies that need adherence: software piracy, creating and distribution of spam or viruses are examples. I do not believe controlling and mandating information and communication technologies is productive but must also state that certain restrictions will inherently exist due to costs and security.

 What's needed is a process for reviewing and incorporating collaborative technologies. Flexibility,Bates and Pool(2003) offer a frame work that would include questions like these when choosing to implement technology. How does the new technology inteegrate with the current technology? what kind training is needed - internal staff, committee members, others? What kind of technical support is available and needed? what kind of resources need to be in place both externally and internally? How will the technology be used? How will it meet our goals? How many departments within the organization can utilize the technology? What's working now? What's not working? What will happen if we adopt the new technology? What will happen if we don't? Do we need external consultants to help us decide. What are the possible consequences of both adopting the new technology or not? What kind of security issues do we have to deal with? Access and privacy are a priority within any interchange of confidential information.

As collaborations shift how we communicate and learn, organizations must have strategy to assess and possibly apply those tools within their business goals in today's market.

I agree Dawn with the idea of a process, and support framework being established to review all forms of learning technology. We