University of Zurich (UNIZH, CH)

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The University of Zurich was founded in 1833, though its origins stretch back as far as 1525 and the days of protestant reformer Ulrich Zwingli.
Today the University enjoys international renown as a place of education and research. Two thousand lecturers in 140 special institutes provide the broadest range of subjects and courses available from any Swiss seat of higher education. With 21,000 students and 1,900 graduates every year, Zurich is also Switzerland's largest university. The University provides academic services, works with the private sector and considers itself part of a national and global network for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. The project work will be performed by the Information Management Research Group (IM-Group) in the Department of Information Technology which is part of the Faculty of Business Administration. The group is still in its founding phase. It currently consists of four fulltime researchers and is planned grow to six to eight fulltime researchers by the end of 2003.

Research areas of the IM-Group include computer supported cooperative work, collaborative and mobile learning and e-government. Relevant projects are:

• The German NSF funded project Sywikol deals with media choice for collaborative learning. As more and more media (face-to-face meetings, telephone, E-Mail, Chat, SMS...) become availablle, the issue of a productive media choice older theories such as media richness theory need to be revisited.
• In the EU-project Mobilearn we apply mobile learning to Executive MBAs and help create a mobile collaborative learning environment.

Furthermore we develop an ambient collaborative environment at our Zurich location. Key researchers are Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schwabe and Dirk Frohberg.
Gerhard Schwabe is Ordinarius for Information Systems in the IT-Research Department. Dirk Frohberg is working for him as a fulltime researcher and prepares his dissertation on mobile learning.

Key people: Gerhard Schwabe, Dirk Frohberg

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