August 2008

Guest post by Phil Ice, Ed.Dﾠ.

(Dr. Ice is currently the Director of Course Design, Research & Development at American Public University System. He has been using Buzzword in his teaching for the past year, and has conducted extensive research on the impact of using Buzzword versus alternatives.)

In the traditional online classroom students complete papers and projects in Word and submit them to the instructor as an email attachment. When the project is collaborative in nature, the typical workflow model involves using the track changes and commenting feature. At the point that a project is deemed complete the changes and comments are removed and passed to the instructor, via an email attachment, who adds yet another layer of comments and markups.ﾠ

In the spirit of web 2.0, an alternative to the above process has emerged in the form of free, online document editors. Buzzword, Google Docs and Zoho are some of the best known products in this sphere. A core function among these is the ability to create a document online and invite others to view and / or collaborate. Other features vary by product and include the ability to include tables, images and other fundamental features found in Word. However, the means of editing vary significantly from product to product.ﾠ

In four online, graduate-level, education courses students (n = 78) were asked to submit group projects using Word and Buzzword in alternating fashion. Buzzword was selected from the available online document collaboration tools as it offers several unique features, including pagination, intuitive media editing mechanisms and a visually oriented sharing mechanism.

Continue reading "Research on Buzzword's Effectiveness" »

At a recent education conference, it was gratifying to hear several stories from Acrobat.com users, detailing how they use our applications to work together more effectively.

One of the common threads was the degree to which Acrobat.com enabled the workflow required in developing electronic materials. This was a pleasant surprise to hear - as you've probably seen, we focus quite a bit on collaboration. However, we have not yet explicitly developed capabilities that facilitate workflow. This would include things like mapping out the steps in a process, assigning tasks based on roles, supporting complete annotation of the process throughout, etc.

Continue reading "Acrobat.com Collaboration Workflow" »

(This entry is authored by Ruchi Kumar, a graduate student at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, working as a business systems analyst here at Adobe for a summer internship.)

So who does the Acrobat.com services benefit? One possible scenario is for students at grad schools (like me!). Many courses are project oriented with typical team sizes of 3-4 people. This brings up the scheduling issue - with everyone having their own busy schedules and priorities, it gets difficult to setup a time and space where all can physically meet. In the past, we were forced to juggle with a wide range of collaboration tools to solve these concerns.

Continue reading "A great way to accomplish a school project!" »

Have you tried the remote control feature in ConnectNow yet? This useful functionality enables you to control another computer from your own desktop. You can be sitting at your desk in Chicago, logged in to your ConnectNow meeting room with your colleague from Tokyo, and, with permission, take control of your colleague’s computer.

Here’s a real example. I have a friend named David who works at a startup software company. OK, he IS the company: chief software architect, QA manager, documentation writer, and technical support engineer. David has created a good piece of software for retail businesses and he takes pride in being available to his customers around the clock for technical support. The problem is, his phone does ring and he spends too much time trying to walk people through troubleshooting procedures. I told him there is a better way.

Continue reading "Take control (of another user’s screen, that is!)" »