How to train cyberinfrastructure facilitators

  Cotelco is so honored to host a meeting with two agents from United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to discuss issues related to collaboration in the subject matter such as human security, policy implementation in the sub-regional level. The director of Cotelco--Professor Cogburn showed a wonderful presentation about how web-conferencing tool such as Elluminate can foster distributed collaboration. With Elluminate, people around the world could, to some degree,overcome the constraints of various time zones and physical proximity to better communicate synchronously and asynchronously. One amazing technology demonstration Professor Cogburn showed was using the tool called "closed-captioning" (one of the tool of Elluminate). 

 Elluminate pays more attention to universal design. This web-conferencing tool takes a radically different approach than other eLearning product. They take consideration of people with disabilities. For example, the closed-captioning tool can help deaf people to have the access by reading the screen while lecturers are giving speech. To be more specific, the deaf people just need to click the "CC" icon button at the left top of Elluminate screen. Then the closed-captioning box will pop up and scribe what the lecturer is speaking.   So people with disabilities can fully participate in the meeting. 

 Because of the impressive technology demonstration showed by Professor Cogburn, those two agents and one professor from American University opened up a question: how long it will take people to be trained as cyberinfrastructure facilitators. And what kind of requirements are needed in order to be qualified as a cyberinfrastructure facilitator? How well they should be at subject matter  in order to help those subject expertise to share their ideas within and outside their research field. 

As a social scientist, Professor Cogburn is still exploring the empirical evidence to deal with the issue how to train cyberinfrastructure facilitators.  One of Cotelco's major mission is to provide international service and contribute to new knowledge by using mixed methods social science research to explore the social-technical infrastructure required to support geographically distributed collaboration. So we are looking forward to work with UNDP on the Transcend Collaboratory.