July 29, 2009. CCNMTL educational technologist Tucker Harding represented the Center in a recent article on emerging online collaboration tools used in education. In "Virtual Solutions," published in the May/June issue of BizEd, author Tricia Bisoux features Harding and Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, director of the Higher Education Practice in the International Business Services Group at Cisco Systems, and shares their perspectives on how collaboration tools are transforming education.

Both Harding and Wilen-Daugenti note in the article that technologies, like web-conferencing and wikis, allow for richer learning experiences and enable students to connect across classroom boundaries. The author points to CCNMTL's Global Classroom as one example. This project, created with faculty partner and Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs, organizes and delivers online lectures and readings for a master's level, sustainable development course simultaneously taught at a dozen universities around the world. Harding describes that the project allows students from diverse backgrounds to work together on common problems: "Using these tools is about more than just convenience. We want students to feel as if they are part of a single classroom. With something like the Global Classroom, someone working in Latin America is in the same course as someone working in Africa's Millennium Village. They don't just talk to each other about obstacles they faced in the past; they can talk about the obstacles they faced that very day." Read more about Harding's take on collaboration tools by downloading Virtual Solutions (PDF).