This past Friday, I attended the Wiley Accounting Exchange Conference at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. Of the breakout sessions, I was most interested in the session entitled, "Teaching traditional courses via Distance Learning."
The session was interesting, but it did not take long to realize that my work with the Groove workspace was far ahead of what the speakers were talking about in the program. When I described what my students are doing with Ashok's "GXl" program, participants got pretty excited and started asking lots of questions about Groove.
I gave them the Groove Networks web address and suggested that they explore and see for themselves what Groove can do. I volunteered to answer questions and to help participants, should they decide to take the next step and try Groove with their classes.
It's not surprising that the academic community knows little about Groove. For, so far, Groove Networks has done an excellent job of ignoring the academic community. Hopefully, now that v2.5 has been published, Groove Networks will broaden it's market-view and see the potential for Groove's use within the academic market.
I am talking with the Dean of my campus about adopting Groove for campus-wide use. In particular, I would like to see our business and accounting students learn how to use Groove, and become as proficient with Groove as they are with Microsoft's "Office" suite programs.
I have suggested to Groove's marketing people that Groove Networks needs to adopt Microsoft's approach to "seeding the world" with its products. Microsoft makes its software products available to university students and faculty at greatly reduced prices. The lower prices enable faculty to require students to use the programs (e.g., Microsoft Office Suite).
The advantage of this approach is that everyone (faculty and students) are able to speak a common language. The common language lays a basis for collaboration. Groove is the next logical step.
The real payoff for Groove will be when a large enough population of university students are using Groove, as though, Groove were a "natural way of life." When a well-trained student body graduates and goes to work, companies will become adopters of Groove. The student-workers will want to use the tools that they are used to using.
I've been asked to be a panelist at the upcoming 2003 Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin - Madison during the summer of 2003. This is quite an honor to be asked to participate in this conference.
My topic will focus on "Blending the Best: Asychronous and Synchronous Models that Work." The conference coordinators are very interested in how I use Groove to deliver distance-learning courses.
As always, I would appreciate your comments and feedback.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie
Email: rlillie@csusb.edu
10:36:45 PM 
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