Origins: None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us
What Is Collaboration Campus™
The "Campus" Metaphor and Topology
Value Proposition and Benefits
Features and Functions

Origins: None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us

"Individuals are forced to consider more information and opportunities than they can effectively process. This information overload is made worse by ‘data smog’, the proliferation of low quality information allowed by easy publication. It leads to anxiety, stress, alienation, and potentially dangerous errors of judgment." Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control by Francis Heylighen.

Even when we’ll have much better summarizing and other meaning-making tools than we have today, no amount of technology will give us peace of mind when we will need it most - in the midst of rapid technological changes which affect how we live, work, learn, and play.

To rightfully trust our capacity to learn as fast as necessitated by the pace of changes which affect us--individuals, communities and organizations--, we need to learn how to learn faster together.

Recommendations and pointers to resources, emailed by friends and colleagues in our social and knowledge networks, are some of the signposts that many professionals and managers use for navigating in today’s fast-moving landscapes.

If none of us is as smart as all of us, then creating shared resources, shared social and knowledge capital, is one of the smartest things we can do.

The intent and core idea of Collaboration Campus™ is to provide a space for mastering the arts of collaborative learning, and building valuable social capital just by participating in the life of the campus community.

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What Is Collaboration Campus™

Rapid and effective response to fast-moving opportunities and threats requires (a) accelerated knowledge development, (b) raising competence in collaborative learning, and (c) a knowledge ecosystem which supports learning communities.

Collaboration Campus™ is a proven design for virtual learning environments optimized for peer-to peer knowledge development and building learning communities.

It is not a virtual campus implemented in code; it is a foundational architectural design and methodology for building highly-customizable and scalable platforms capable to support various collaboration practices of different types of online communities.

Because of the platform-independent design and methodology of Collaboration Campus™, any collaboration environment built by using its specifications will be more responsive to the unique and evolving needs and aspirations of its users and their communities. Elements of Collaboration Campus™ has been embodied and tested in a number of our past projects. Its power comes from CoIL's two decades of experience in designing, hosting and facilitating online communities and events.

The environment consists of an integrated set of virtual spaces and processes optimized to enable "highly triple-E" collaboration in and across professional communities: Effective, Efficient, Enjoyable.

Collaboration Campus™ is built on the research-based principles of the Community Design Architecture™, a proven framework and methodology for rapid deployment of learning community infrastructures.

It can be tailored to the specific needs and aspirations of its user community, and can be implemented on top of a variety of off-the-shelf collaboration engines. Specific implementations are currently under negotiation with leading providers of collaboration platforms.

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The "Campus" Metaphor and Topology

"Campus" signifies a place where people come to learn, gain experience, interact with other people, acquire knowledge, friendships and valuable social relationships. Collaboration Campus™ is a virtual learning environment designed for the same.

It consists of a rich and evolving set of learning resources and tools, organized around the spatial metaphor of "campus" which provides an easy-to-navigate interface. All the resources and tools can be accessed through the two main areas of the campus: the Learning Plaza and the Community Plaza.

From the Learning Plaza one can access: Question Basket, Issues List, Resource Center, Project Space, Presentation Hall, News Feeds and Events & Booking.

On the Community Plaza users can find: Orientation Center, Member Directory, Interaction Center, Story House and Knowledge Café.

The features listed above are only the standard features of the Collaboration Campus™, each implementation of which can also be coupled with capabilities and services specifically designed for meeting the needs, aspirations and working conditions of the user organization.

Behind this intuitive interface, there’s an array of personalization technologies which help to create a memorable, sometimes even transformative, user experience, in an integrated virtual learning environment.

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Value Proposition and Benefits

The principal promise of Collaboration Campus™ is to inspire and to enable the augmentation of the participating individuals’ and organizations’ collaboration competence which will become, in the age of the Web, their main competitive advantage.

The campus combines state-of-the-art collaborative learning methods and process templates with web-based technologies, to let its users reach their learning objectives faster, and to meet increasingly complex professional challenges and opportunities as they emerge.

Our promise will be delivered through the following specific benefits.

• Faster spread of successful practices, technology and business solutions, throughout the organizations and its web of alliances

• Raising motivation and competence in knowledge sharing

• Wider pool of combined knowledge and expertise available to any member of its communities of practice

• Each member’s increased ease of access to the shared knowledge of other members, anytime, from anywhere

• Members finding other members with similar or complementary interests more easily, around the globe or in their town, free from the constraints of distance and the challenges of scheduling of real-time meetings with busy professionals.

• Scalability: all platform resources can equally be used by a very small or very large numbers of connected professional communities

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Features and Functions

The features of C-Campus are grouped by what its functions can do for its three categories of users:

• individual community members

• teams, communities, organizations

• community facilitators and knowledge gardeners

Those three sets of functions create a fertile soil for the healthy knowledge ecology of your projects and organization. The seeds will come from your objectives of using Collaboration Campus™.

The features presented below are only examples, excerpt from our High-Level Design Document (HLDD) describing many others, in much greater detail. Typically, we define the mix of features appropriate to each situation, based on the analysis of our clients' needs and aspirations.

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Features Supporting Individual Users

• The Orientation Center provides you with information on the campus communities, its events, navigation and help systems, categories of membership and how to become a member.

• The context-sensitive, personalized, and multi-dimensional help system has built in incentives for helping novice users along a painless path to become "power users."

• The navigation system minimizes the number of clicks to any destination on the campus, and prevents the "lost in cyberspace" syndrome. Its subsystems include:

• Keyword and Boolean search of the whole system or its specified areas
• "Table of Contents"-style index of site content and conversation topics in the Interaction Center
• Clickable, multi-layer site maps and concept maps
• Dynamic maps based on user's preferences and sub-community membership

• In your personal workspace, you are supported by indexing, drawing, journaling and other tools for organizing and updating your mental models of your knowledge landscapes and social networks. Its subsystems include:

• An organized collection of annotated hyperlinks
• A notebook, where you can copy quotes, develop ideas, and gather chunks of relevant content from cybraries and forums
• A personal file library - a collection of work-in-progress and other documents, complete with version control
• A private learning journal--implemented as a single-reader weblog--for recording the observations, insights and "Aha!s" of your learning journey

• Publishing tools for selectively sharing documents developed in your personal workspace

• A personalization system--your "MyC-Campus"--supports both user-defined and profile-driven personalization.

• A notification system can alert you when items of your particular interest appear anywhere on the campus, and when content posted by you is responded to by others. The system can also send you summaries of new activity on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and issue invitations to certain virtual events.

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Features Supporting Teams and Communities

Learning Plaza

• Question Basket

This is a facility for posting questions, collecting and rating answers.

Questions that matter are the primary source of learning in community.

• Issues List

This is a facility for listing, indexing, ranking, clustering and managing issues suggested for the collaborative learning agenda of the community.

• Cybraries

Each community can use a dynamic repository of knowledge objects for building its domain-specific knowledge base, supported by collaboratively developed taxonomies.

• Project Space

Shared workspace including tools for real-time collaboration, calendaring, voting, polling, surveying and rating.

• News

Customizable feeds from news services contracted to provide information relevant to the Campus’ communities.

• Presentation Hall

A space designed for real-time and hybrid-time web lectures in a virtual auditorium.

Community Plaza

• Campus Nexus

This portal-style homepage provides one-click access to the active learning communities and projects of the campus, and to its most frequently visited spaces and resources located on the Learning Plaza and the Community Plaza.

• Member Directory

This is an indexed collection of personal profiles with information about areas of expertise and interest. Future versions will include tools for building, portraying and accessing one’s personal networks.

• Interaction Center

The Interaction Center is a single-point access to all conversation spaces and tools of the campus. It has a running record of all current forums (real-time and asynchronous), their topics, and guidelines for setting up your own.

• Success Story House

The "story house" is a library of stories on effective practices, captured in a pattern language which supports collaborative problem solving and competence building through knowledge sharing.

A "pattern" is an encapsulated story of a successful practice, optimized for rapid location and re-use of knowledge relevant to the type of problems that the practice resolves.

• Knowledge Café

A virtualized version of a set of innovative methods for tapping into a community’s collective intelligence, used in business, government and education, in real-time, physical settings, based on the "WorldCafe" model.

• Events & Booking

The "Events & Booking" section provides access to events outside the campus, which are of potential interest to its communities.

It can be browsed by Title, Date, Location, Taxonomy category.

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If you think your organization could benefit from Collaboration Campus™ and want to explore how, don't hesitate to contact us.