As online communications gains recognition throughout the academic community, my hope is to create a section of the IAOC devoted to discussing online communications courses and programs in academic institutions all over the world. This will be a resource for educators and students to learn about and share information pertaining to the study of internet communications.

I would like to invite educators and instructors to share on the blog any information regarding their online communications courses and research. Furthermore, I will post any relevant information that I discover from surveying various university websites and course catalogs.

photo courtesy of lukethelibrarian, used under this Creative Commons license

In next week's IAOCblog program, "The Virtual Mirror: Patterns in Collaboration," MIT researcher Peter Gloor will discuss the implications of a newly-released paper analyzing data of employee interactions gathered through sensors worn voluntarily by employees. You don't want to miss it. In the meantime, a little more about Peter Gloor.

Peter Gloor is a research scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's  Sloan School of Business Management. Gloor leads a project exploring "Collaborative Innovation Networks" or "COINs," and documents this work on two sites, the more formal Innovative Collaborative Knowledge Networks site and the less formal Swarm Creativity Blog.

You can understand the implications of Gloor's work a little better if I give an example. Gloor has designed software that makes the analysis of giant databases of employee interactions fairly easy. He analyzed over 1 million email records from Enron Corporation for evidence that the leaders of the company had knowledge of the fraudulent methods they were charged with. Interested in what he discovered?

Tune in next week for the start of This Week on IAOCblog.com's fall season with a session led by MIT's Peter Gloor.

STEVE O'KEEFE
Co-Producer, This Week on IAOCblog.com