Collective Collaboration

These are notes we took at the DTLT office yesterday while brainstorming ideas for 2 courses we have the opportunity to create for the Spring Semester under the American Studies discipline of the History Department at UMW. But yesterday we did things differently. Rather than simply erasing the whiteboard and writing down our ideas, we fired up the video camera and started broadcasting on DTLT Today feed. I sent out the invitation for folks to collaborate with us by joining the chat and brainstorming live in realtime with our office. We had people everywhere from Arkansas and California to Canada jump into the chat and start giving us ideas. It was a ton of fun and while live broadcasting is nothing new, this was an example where the technology had gotten out of the way to the point where we felt comfortable saying "Let's turn it on and invite others". It was living, it was real, and it worked. We got a lot of great ideas from that session and I know we'll do this again. Collaboration doesn't have to be a roundtable discussion between you and your coworkers. It doesn't even have to be a Google Doc with your network. It can be a personal, intimate live broadcasted conversation. Services like Google Hangout would even add the element of audio and video to the people participating with you. It's an amazing time to be working as a collective.

Tim Owens

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