Collaborative Working and Learning

Jane Hart takes a broad look at collaborative working and learning.

Collaborative brainstorming and mindmapping

• Mind42
• MindMeister
• Comapping.com

Collaborative diagramming

• Gliffy
• LucidChart
• Dabbleboard

Collaborative authoring

• Wiki tools
  • Wetpaint - free platform including social networking
  • Google Sites - Google’s web authoring tool
  • Confluence - enterprise system
• Online office suites
  • Google Docs
  • Zoho Suite - compatible with MS Office tools
  • Microsoft Office Live Workspace -  save Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents online, and control who views and edits them
• Stand alone tools
  • Etherpad - real-time document collaboration
  • Editgrid - online collaborative spreadsheet service
  • Sliderocket - works in sync with others on presentations

Collaborative reviewing

• PleaseReview - secure, browser-based review environment. Reviewers can see each other's comments and changes and can reply, and authors can decide which comments and changes to accept. Authors get a single document with consolidated comments and changes.

Collaborative reflection

• Blogger - Google’s free blogging tool
• Wordpress - popular free blogging tool
• TypePad - commercial, hosted blogging platform

Collaborative commenting

• Scribd - for documents
• Flickr - for images
• YouTube - for videos
• Slideshare - for presentation slidesets

Collaborative annotation

• Diigo - add notes and in-page highlights
• iLighter - highlight, collect and share the web
• Trailfire - add notes (aka trail marks) and save web pages

Collaborative productivity

• Google Calendar - collaborative meeting scheduling
• Remember the Milk - shareable task management tool
• skrbl - free online whiteboard

Collaborative working (spaces)

• Google Groups - free, hosted service that lets members have discussions as well share files
• Central Desktop - tool for team, group or enterprise collaboration
• Microsoft SharePoint - enterprise workspace platform for sharing information and working together in teams

Collaborative project management

• 5pm
• Basecamp
• Easyprojects

Collaborative course design and development

• Atlantic Link’s Content Point
• Unison
• Mohive’s E-Learning Publishing Suite

Collaborative learning (spaces)

• Moodle - open source VLE that has a number of collaborative tools that can be incorporated into a formal course learning space.

There are also a number of other open source systems that can be installed and configured to create collaborative, informal work/learn spaces for organisations, that also include a range of other social activities like user profiling, and social bookmarking, as well as blogging and file sharing. Tools in this category include: Drupal and Elgg.