Society Goes Online

Collaborating
Over and over the importance of collaborating is discussed as a key factor to effectively execute. Collaboration allows visibility across business units, into program status, and optimizes operational reviews. There are multiple tools that are free that can be utilize to accomplish this tasks.

Collaborating via Web
The future of collaboration is virtual tools such as Second Life. Second Life allows users to build objects, set permissions, re size, re texture, move, copy, and delete objects in Second life. Other items include developing a project and test it in Second Life. There are universities such as Colorado Technical University (CTU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that host classes and meetings in this virtual world. Companies and professionals collaborate via virtual forums on various worlds. This environment allows for multiple organizations to host meetings for free thus reducing overhead and allowing for collaboration beyond simple two dimensional discussion boards.

Review of Book
In the book Technology's Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society written by W. E. Halah a key chapter that sticks out is society moves online. There are many items discussed such as global access, entertainment on demand, virtual reality, teleliving, and shifting social foundations. The particular section of the book is important to me as I live in this age that is being discussed. For instance I attended Athens State University for my Bachelors in Science in Applied Technology on their ground campus in Athens, AL (USA). However I made the transition to receive my Master of Science in Management in Information Systems Security at Colorado Technical University (Colorado Tech) completely online while living in Cedar Rapids, IA (USA). While in the program tools such as Macromedia Breeze were utilize to view the professor, presentation, and talk live with the entire class to include recording it for later viewing. I was able to join networking groups through the virtual campus. I was able to search multiple journals and libraries all through the university's online system. Even now in my doctoral class we utilize Second Life, blogs, and various web 2.0 tools to communicate and collaborate. I would have never thought of having a large social network of friends and family from across the world in Germany, Ghana, Canada, France, United Kingdom (U.K.), Japan, and many states. Through the advances of society going online I was able to meet my current wife. We were able to exchange lines of communication for eight months before meeting one another and once we met we utilized various web tools for communicating such as Skype, Myspace, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and others.

Halal discusses something that he calls the intelligence interface. This intelligence interface is suggested to replace today's dumb computer interface. This interface is more of artificial intelligence with speak recognition migrating toward providing more of a conversational form of human machine interaction. The example provided is to show in a virtual environment with a virtual salesperson greeting you rather than going to the a web site in which your search for the product(s) needed. This is a perfect example of the intelligence interface in teleliving which is simple defined as the later trend in social relationships.

References
[1] W. E. Halal, Technology's Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society, 1 ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.