Collaboration, greatly facilitated by advanced telecommunication networks, has become a dominant mode of conducting academic work. However, when collaborators meet in both physical and "electronic" spaces there are a number of unexamined costs that go with the efficiency and inclusiveness made possible by easy telecommunication-based exchanges. This article asks collaborators to be sensitive to the role that physical space plays in creative human endeavors, and to consider the impact on work accomplished in merged electronic and physical work environments. A history of city space and university space are presented within Richard Sennett's notion of exposure: a delicate balance of fear and stimulation associated with community. The concluding section of this article considers how to build the collaborative university so that the pleasures of physical space are preserved, and the efficiencies of reaching across distances with telecommunications can be leveraged. The article's coda presents a case study, and efforts are made to use hypermedia's attributes to improve the collaboration between author and reader.
The goal of this exploratory study is to examine student use of a prototype networked collaborative design environment to support or augment learning about engineering design. The specific goals of the research are to characterize design activities and practices and to examine the use of multiple communication resources to augment activities in a three-way group collaboration. This paper examines the communication resource use of students engaged in a collaborative design activity. Students use the channels for a variety of activities to increase depth of communication, increase breadth of communication, and overcome technical difficulty. Conclusions suggest that students need multiple representations of design information to effectively move the design process forward.
This essay presents a framework for developing technology-mediated inter-institutional relationships for collaborative telelearning. This framework highlights the issues and implications of developing and maintaining partnering relationships between universities. The development of this framework is an outgrowth of two inter-institutional relationships between three large state universities: between the University of Maryland at College Park and Indiana University, and between the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of Arizona. The essay provides a description of both inter-institutional relationships, focusing specifically on inception, execution, and ongoing evaluation experiences. These experiences are subsequently used to illustrate how a framework for developing inter-institutional relationships can be used to both guide the design of new and the assessment of existing relationships. The essay concludes by discussing costs and benefits of inter-institutional relationships at four levels of activity.
With new technologies relentlessly redefining the way we work and live, it may not merely be an anachronism to continue to embrace the model of the traditional residential university as the primary locus of learning -- it may arguably be an impediment to appropriate learning and ultimately a threat to growth, both economic and personal. Partly from this vision, and partly from the imperative of improving student mobility within the European Union, ERASMUS-funded Inter-university Cooperation Programmes (ICP) have been created. ICP OnLine, accessed through the World Wide Web, was launched in the Summer of 1994 to provide "virtual mobility." This article focuses on an ICP OnLine in the area of Informatics/Artificial Intelligence and discusses the programme's objectives, student experiences, and the risks and opportunities afforded by multicultural/multilingual Internet-based education.
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