Our goal: Building an infrastructure for
supporting and enhancing collaboration.
Bell University Labs (BUL) - Collaborative Environment
Project is one of five Labs that have been established at the University of Toronto as part of a collaboration
between Bell Canada and the University of Toronto. The goal of the project is to build an infrastructure that will
serve as a virtual environment, where geographically distributed teams can collaborate.
The virtual environment is envisioned as a
flexible space, where teams of different sizes, compositions, and with a wide range of tasks can come
together in order to accomplish their goal. Although a number of different virtual environments exist, they still
lack the flexibility to fulfill the needs of a wide range of groups.
What makes this project unique is its aim to create a space that can
be tailored easily to the needs of diverse groups. The starting point is to build a virtual space that can be adapted
to integrate different tools thereby changing its functionality. From the literature, a conceptual framework has been
derived to guide the process of tool construction and selection. Also a taxonomy of tools has been proposed that
describes and evaluates a wide range of tools that can be potentially integrated into the collaborative environment.
The types of tools that comprise the virtual environment are designed specifically for supporting group interactions
and learning, including communication tools and digital libraries.
The BUL - Collaborative Environment Team is
composed of researchers from diverse disciplines including computer science, industrial and mechanical
engineering, psychology, and sociology.
Please take this opportunity to learn more about the
project and the people involved.
Continue: Project Background/Context.
