Taylor Zeller's List: Researching Credible Connections

The notion of collaboration itself is a multifaceted concept, encompassing an array of dimensions (Hackett, 2005; Sonnenwald, forthcoming 2007). What distinguishes it from many other organizational aspects of research (e.g., team size, bureaucractic structure) is that it is generally viewed as a symbiotic and mutually beneficial activity (Shrum, Genuth, & Chompalov, forthcoming 2007).

With the rise of the world wide Web there has been a growing interest in Internet based services which can flexibly work together to perform more complex tasks than that performed by any single service alone.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor who studies the economics of networks, thinks such online cooperation is spurring a new mode of production beyond the two classic pillars of economics, the firm and the market. "Peer production," as he calls work such as open-source software, file-sharing, and Amazon.com Inc.'s millions of customer product reviews, creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. "The economic role of social behavior is increasing," he says. "Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products."

Due to the fact that a ‘persona’ can be generated or disbanded at very low cost to the creator, ‘personas’
tend to be very ‘thin’ with little to no sustentative information or data. This is not conducive
to establishing ‘trust-relationships’ which build collaborative behavior. To counteract this, a number of solutions have been presented. For example Ellen Rusman et.al’s ‘Personal Identity Profiles’ (PIP’s). (Rusman, Bruggen, & Koper,2007a; Rusman et al.,2007b) Rusman et.al suggest that the ‘persona’ presented should, through the use of a standard template, provide a personal identity profile (PIP). The PIP should “[p]rovide static as well as dynamic information on personal identity”. Rusman et.al. believe that the PIP ‘facilitates communication between experts”.

In a review of the literature on organizational trust models, Shockley-Zalabak, Ellis and Winograd (2000) suggest that conceptions of uncertainty, dependency, influence, and behavior expectations impact perceptions of trust. Further, they show that much of the research in this area relates organizational effectiveness to greater levels of trust. High levels of organizational trust have been linked to such outcomes as more adaptive organizational forms and structures, strategic alliances, responsive virtual teams and effective crisis management.

Nowadays, CSCL synchronous environments are mainly focused in the learning of theoretical lessons. However, sometimes theory does not provide enough
knowledge to students, especially in the field of engineering education. As a solution to this problem, virtual laboratories (VLs) represent distributed environments of simulation which are intended to perform the interactive simulation of a mathematical model of a real system (Dormido, 2004). By means of them, students can learn through the Internet in a practical way and thus become aware of physical phenomena that are difficult to explain from just a theoretical point of view.

Still, unaided technology can only enable collaboration up to a rather informal point. As a widely distributed activity becomes more ambitious and complex, pragmatic issues - such as who will pay for the servers and manage related administrative duties - begin to arise. So, too, do legal concerns, including who will own the resulting work product, and make sure that no third party's rights are infringed.

[5] W. R. Cheswick and S. M. Bellovin, Firewalls and Internet Security. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Such an approach poses two major problems. First, against the widely perceived potentials of the Internet, firewalls make (real-time) user interaction and collaboration much more difficult, if not impossible, especially across organizational boundaries [5]. Second, firewalls cannot be universally applied. For example, small companies or individuals users may not be able to afford the installation and maintenance of firewalls. Moreover, in the case of home users and mobile users, providing an extra, physically separate firewall machine is not practical.