What:  NYTimes article about  Cisco’s showcasing its TelePresence system.
Posts to which it is related:  Supportive and Critical Communication in Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology
Bottom line:  This article reviews the use of Cisco’s TelePresence system during a press conference at which the company announced new servers. According to the author (Ashlee Vance), the press conference was too long, felt unnatural and scripted, and failed to deliver on its promise of a feeling of presence via this teleconferencing system.  So should we give up on this kind of system, or on achieving a natural feeling of presence during teleconferencing?  No.  The system is only technology, and human beings still need to make good decisions to use that technology effectively.  This is precisely why a new kind of leadership – virtual leadership – is necessary for teams and companies who want to adopt collaborative technologies.  Systems like TelePresence don’t do away with the need for a savvy team leader any more than fax machines substituted for leadership.

What:  NYTimes article about the uses of Twitter.
Posts to which it is related:  What President Obama Teaches Us For Leading Virtually, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology, Freeing Yourself from Email
Bottom line:  This is a great little article whose main point is that there are a lot of ways Twitter can be used, and you should use it for whatever works for you.  I think that when new forms of collaborative technology are presented to the public, and many of them are complex, lots of us have a tendency to shy away thinking we can’t master or understand it.  So this reminder is very valuable – remember that collaborative technology is only a tool.  Individuals must assess the features, figure out some of the possibilities, and ultimately determine how those possibilities solve your problems or fill a need you have.  Try something new today, whether it’s joining Twitter or blogging or creating an avatar in a virtual world.  See what you can harvest from these technologies that helps you achieve a social goal!

What:  NYTimes article about a Google project to bring Internet access to areas that previously had none.
Posts to which it is related:  None
Bottom line:  There’s something about the concept of bringing technology to remote areas in Africa that makes me cringe a little because the presentation can get condescending pretty quickly.  Still, this project represents a really interesting social experiment.  We have talked before in our blog about the fact that virtual and collaborative technologies have incredible potential for rethinking collaboration, but that it will take time before people can come up with truly innovative ways of using those technologies.  The primary stumbling block is that we have so many assumptions about the technologies, it’s hard to conceptualize new uses.  For example, we seem to have trouble using virtual worlds for anything other than meetings or classes that reflect those events in the “real” world.  So when Google brings Internet access to people who have had hardly any modern technology (no phones, no computers, etc), they are moving the Internet into a group of people without any of the “baggage” of assumptions that more experienced technology users have.  The Africans in the village in this article are just as clever and adaptive as we are, but without all that we take for granted about technology.  I imagine once they find their way around the computer and the Internet, they could have some really ground-breaking ideas for how to use them.  In the work-obsessed parts of the world, meetings are ritual; we have duplicated those “rituals” without much innovation in virtual worlds.  What parts of human ritual will transfer to virtual worlds from people in a place where they don’t spend most of their time at work in an office?

The other important part of this social experiment is that we might have as much to learn from a remote African village as they do from the “western world”.  These technologies were meant to help us save time and be more efficient, yet many of us find ourselves weighed down by them (think of the crush of daily emails many people complain about).  Perhaps there is a lot about a non-technological life that we can learn from, just as much as African villagers can learn when they gain Internet access.