- What are collaborative technologies?
- RSS feeds
- Wikis
- SharePoint
- Google Groups
- Social bookmarking and tagging
What are collaborative technologies?
Collaborative technologies are ICT "tools" that enable people to interact with other people within a group more efficiently and, in many cases, more effectively. This includes familiar tools like email discussion lists and tele-conferencing. Recently, a number of new collaborative tools have emerged that have much to offer groups of researchers looking for new ways to increase their productivity and overall effectiveness. They are particularly relevant to groups where individual members are not all geographically co-located.
If you would like more information about any of these technologies, please contact your CSO, staff from High Performance Computing or your Liaison Librarian.
RSS Feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) allows you to view tables of contents from recently published electronic journals, news headlines, and new content on websites without having to visit each individual web site. Aggregated content is made available through an "RSS feed reader".
Many RSS feeds are indicated with either a blue RSS or orange XML icon. The process for adding a subscription varies from reader to reader, you may be able to subscribe by simply dragging this icon to your reader.
Many RSS feed readers are available to download, free of charge. Once the software is installed, you simply enter the addresses of RSS "feeds" that you are interested in and the program will regularly check each site, alerting you to any new content it finds. This is a very convenient way of staying up to date. Some examples are listed below:
- selection of biomedical and health sciences RSS news feeds from Ebling Library, University of Wisconsin.
- RSS Feeds for journals published by the Nature Publishing Group
- Web-based RSS Feed Readers; Windows-based RSS Feed Readers; Cross-platform RSS Feed Readers
Wikis
Wiki is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, remove, or edit all content, very quickly and easily. This makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. Some wikis allow completely unrestricted access so anyone is able to contribute to the site, others require authentication so that only registered users will have access.
SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint enables groups to develop a portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that people can take advantage of relevant information to help them work more efficiently. The portal facilitates end-to-end collaboration by enabling aggregation, organization, and search capabilities for people, teams, and information. Users can find relevant information quickly through customization and personalization of portal content and layout. Organizations can target information, programs, and updates to audiences based on their organizational role, team membership, interest, security group, or any other membership criteria that can be defined.
SharePoint is available at QUT. Ask your computing support person or the staff from the HPC section for more information.
Google Groups
Google Groups is a free service which helps groups of people to communicate effectively using email and the Web. Every group has a home page hosted by Google where members can start new discussions or reply to older topics. Every group also has its own email address to help its members stay in touch with each other. Your group can be open to the public or viewable only to members. Google Groups lets you create your own mailing list in just minutes.
Social bookmarking and tagging
Connotea enhances collaboration via shared annotations (notes, explanations, or remarks) that can be attached to any Web document or a selected part of the document. When another group member gets the document he or she can also load the annotations attached to it from a selected annotation server or several servers and see what his peer group thinks. Connotea is also a system for sharing “bookmarks” or “favourites” which can be collaboratively organized them under different topics, to facilitate group access to them later.
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software.