Collaborative Work, Agents, Blogs, and Wikis By: Laurel Baston and Blake Cherry

Collaborative Work  Collaborative Work means working as part of a group activity. The group activity is directed towards some shared goal or has some common purpose. As with almost any form of group activity there is some element of social interaction to the work as well as the simple fulfillment of a task.  Collaborative work is useful in technology today: electronic mail, digital voice mail systems, text conferencing, video teleconferencing, collaborative databases, workflow, group decision support systems, and living worlds

Types of Collaborative Work  Electronic Mail or “ ”  Digital Voice Mail Systems  Text Conferencing  Video Teleconferencing Exchange of video signals to see and hear others from long distances Exchange of video signals to see and hear others from long distances  Collaborative Databases

Types of Collaborative Work  Workflow Vendors such as PowerSim or iThink examine the computer to make sure everything is organized Vendors such as PowerSim or iThink examine the computer to make sure everything is organized  Group Decision Support Systems Men and women meet to make a “good” decision as a group Men and women meet to make a “good” decision as a group  Living Worlds Combines virtual reality environments with live voice and physical likenesses of ourselves that can move among and be seen within all the thousands of virtual reality worlds out on the Internet. (site Onlive.net) Combines virtual reality environments with live voice and physical likenesses of ourselves that can move among and be seen within all the thousands of virtual reality worlds out on the Internet. (site Onlive.net)

Agents  An agent is a program that performs some information gathering or processing task in the background  Typically, an agent is given a very small and well-defined task.  Although the theory behind agents has been around for some time, agents have become more prominent with the growth of the Internet.  Many companies now sell software that enables you to configure an agent to search the Internet for certain types of information.

Agents: A Better Understanding  In computer science, there is a school of thought that believes that the human mind essentially consists of thousands or millions of agents all working in parallel. To produce real artificial intelligence, we should build computer systems that also contain many agents and systems for judging among the agents' competing results.

Agents  Examples: Computer and video games have agent and human-agent interaction Computer and video games have agent and human-agent interaction Computers Computers Computers and software Computers and software

Blogs  Blog is short for web log  Blogs are websites created by users that are made in a journal style and they contain remarks on any kind of subject  Most blogs are just personal diaries.  Blogs can contain photographs, videos, and audio media, but most only consist of text.

Wikis  A Wiki is defined as a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it.  The idea of Wiki can be traced back to a HyperCard stack, according to Ward Cunningham, the first person to start developing the Wiki.

Wikis  The Internet Website, Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is an example of a wiki.