Collaborative Work, Agents, Blogs, and Wikis

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Collaborative Work, Agents, Blogs, and Wikis

• By
• Laurel Baston and Blake Cherry

2
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

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Types of Collaborative Work

• Electronic Mail or E-mail
• Digital Voice Mail Systems
• Text Conferencing
• Video Teleconferencing
• Exchange of video signals to see and hear others
  from long distances
• Collaborative Databases

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Types of Collaborative Work

• Workflow
• 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
• 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)

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Agents

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

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Agents

• Examples
• Computer and video games have agent and
  human-agent interaction
• Computers
• Computers and software

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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.

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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.

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Wikis

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