Let’s Build More “Learning” into Even Basic IT Tools

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Let’s Build More “Learning” into Even Basic IT Tools

6/2/2004

By Terry Calhoun

In the past year, I’ve become a big fan and user of what University of Michigan members of the Sakai Project called WorkTools, which then became Course Tools the Next Generation (CTNG), and now is CTools. For those of you who have not experienced the nifty tools that are coming out of that project, I find it easiest to explain to people that it is “sort of like Yahoo! Groups, but without the ads.”

Lately, I’ve been wondering if maybe that tool and some of our other IT tools on campus shouldn’t have more advertisements built into them. By “advertisements” I mean “ads” that could provide regular learning experiences for users in how to become better, more efficient, and safer users. Not something like “This e-mail communication has been brought to you by the Diet Cola Company of America” inserted as a footer in each message your e-mail server transmits or receives. Well, I do mean the “inserted as a footer” (or header) part, but my suggested “educational messages” would read something like, “If you think you detect a security or privacy breach in University of XYZ online data, notify security@syz.edu, and do not tell anyone else.”

Some people take to virtual collaborative worksites really well, others don’t. I do. I had become such a fan of WorkTools since I first learned of it at the NLII conference in New Orleans in January of 2003, that when it became CTNG and then CTools, and the issue of migrating current user groups to the new system came up, it was discovered that I “owned” more virtual worksites than any other single campus user. (How it was that I had to travel to New Orleans to learn of it, even though it is based on the same physical campus as I am, is an interesting and very typical story of academia.)

If you don’t know about virtual worksites, you should. The basic elements of them are management of members, a Web site for archiving e-mail messages, a location on the Web site for sharing documents, possibly a threaded discussion area, member lists and info, and of course an integrated e-mail list for worksite members. Add-ons can include task assignments, calendars, and even live chat windows. All of the above are available in CTools, which is a University of Michigan version of the open source software that the Sakai Project is developing and includes both courseware and collaborative working site functionality.

It was my habit, when proselytizing about virtual collaborative worksites, of describing CTools as “sort of like Yahoo! Groups, but without the ads” that got me to thinking: “Why don’t IT staff build more repetitive, random or targeted, advertisements into such information technology tools—to serve the purpose of user education about functionality as well as security and privacy issues?”

In Yahoo! Groups, which is probably the leader at the moment in terms of “free” access to such groups, users “pay” for using the system by putting up with advertisements. These show up in the various Web-based windows, as well as via insertions to the body of any messages sent to the entire group. Yahoo! Groups are very popular, and very useful.