For example, the IS Department at Brigham Young University has created Island, an "online platform built to facilitate deeply personalized, passion based learning between students, alumni, and professors of the Information Systems program at BYU." The shared blogs and groups at Island are used and valued.
Faculty at other universities report that their students reluctant to contribute to such endeavors, offering various explanations.
The culture at Brigham Young encourages collaboration, perhaps because it is a religious school.
Another example is provided by GI Bill students attending school after serving in Iraq. John Schupp, a chemistry professor at Cleveland State University, which has about 340 former servicemen and women among its 15,000 students sees camaraderie in the classroom as crucial to getting the veterans to show up, to stay and to thrive. “They tell me over and over they wouldn't have come to college otherwise,” he says. “In the military world it’s the team. The squadron must survive. When you come to school it’s all personal — my books, my grade, my stuff, my notes. They're isolated, because other students haven't seen what they've seen.”
No matter how good our software tools are, collaboration will fail in the "my grade ..." culture.
This holds for organizations as well as schools. In an early, frequently referenced study, Wanda Orlikowski found that employees at Price Waterhouse were reluctant to share information using Lotus Notes because they saw other employees as competitors for promotion.