June 2008 — Collaboration 2.0
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Virtual Teamwork
For a group of remote, rural school districts, web-based collaborative projects
are opening up new vistas of learning opportunities.
SITTING DOWN WITH A COHORT OF
GE executives after a late-afternoon
tour of the company's facility in Charlottesville, VA, a
group of educators from the surrounding region could
not have known what was in store for them. The meeting
was one in a round of stops the contingent made
routinely. These scheduled give-and-takes allowed
educators to inform businesses about what schools
were doing to prepare students to go out into the
world, while businesses could tell the educators what
they were looking for from new graduates.
But the meeting at GE went a decidedly different way. Expecting to hear, as they generally did, about the need to address some particular technical or vocational content in their curriculum, the educators listened as the GE group began to talk about more abstract skills, about the need for students to learn to work in teams-- and not just teams within their classrooms or schools, but ones whose participants are separated geographically and rarely, if ever, encounter each other in a face-to-face meeting but instead meet only virtually. None of the educators had even heard of virtual teamwork before.
As the executives explained,"virtual collaborations" are at the heart of the way business is now being done. Sharing documents, running product tests over time zones, real-time discussions-- all are essential to participating and thriving in the global market. A typical team today at GE could span two or three continents and must call upon all of the electronic resources available to it in order to share technical drawings, presentations, notes, and ideas, bridging distances and language barriers.
"Over the past 10 years, our company has gone from having a bulk of workers in Charlottesville to this year tallying more employees outside of the US than inside," says GE Human Resources Director J.B. Mitchell, who was among the group that met with the local educators.
The meeting, held five years ago, turned out to be the catalyst for a determined effort to create virtual collaborations across six rural school systems in central Virginia. Districts in Fluvanna, Goochland, Greene, Louisa, Nelson, and Orange counties had already teamed up in 2000 to launch a regional high school-based project called the Blue Ridge Virtual Governor's School (BRVGS), which brings participating students and teachers in those six districts together for shared coursework and assignments, with a focus on math, science, and technology.
