Upcomming Meetings - IDEALS and ICTs
Two upcomming meetings:
IDEALS Submission Process Evaluation
Friday, *2:30* pm, 1/23/2009, LISB 340
This meeting is scheduled to run until 4:30 pm, unless there is a conflict with Writing Group, in which case we will stop early at 4:00 pm.
http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/
IDEALS is the institutional repository for UIUC run as a joint venture between the UIUC Library and CITES. As such, it is a service “to preserve and provide persistent and reliable access to the digital research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students on the UIUC campus in order to give these works the greatest possible recognition and distribution. IDEALS aims to complement traditional scholarly publishing.” Many faculty, students, and departments are interested in submitting their published and unpublished work. However, while this submission process has been designed to be as simple as possible, it is often found to be a bit onerous by potential users, thus affecting the adoption of this service. Since they began, we have periodically invited them to join us in an effort to evaluate their submission process, in order to give them feedback not only on the interface, but on how IDEALS can fit into the larger sociotechnical work environment of academics. Since our last meeting, their interface has been radically redesigned. Thus, we are trying it out again. Bring your publications and join us in testing the new version of IDEALS. We will be bringing video-taping equipment to this meeting, however, your participation in the taping is entirely optional/voluntary.
Effective and Ineffective Use of ICTs to Support Distributed Groups
Tentative: Friday, 2:00 pm, 1/30/2009, LISB 340
In recent experience some of our members have been participating in distributed groups where the use of ICTs to facilitate communication has been less than successful. While some of the observed difficulties have to do with a lack of organization or leadership, or other factors independent of technology, we also suspect that the technologies chosen and the expectations for adoption were somewhat misguided. Therefore, we are inviting people to join us with stories of successful and not so successful uses of ICT to support distributed groups, in order to get a better idea of what works and why. Feel free to bring in relevant research, especially if you think it is particularly insightful. We’d like to emphasize positive cases for this meeting, simply because there are so many instances of failure; however, particular cases of insightful failures are welcome as well.