23 Mar 2010

Google wave as a collaborating tool

Some of you might be yawning at the title - "Google Wave is so old news". I blogged about Google Wave when it came out and received an invitation soon after that. However, after the initial euphoria I soon got bored and haven't really used it at all. I saw it as just another instant messaging tool with a few extra whistles. A few days back I finally discovered how amazing this new real-time communication and collaboration tool is.

Last Friday, I was at a workshop on Blended learning at the Warwick Business School, where we discussed how electronic/digital technology supports teaching and learning activities. I did a short presentation on how social media and specifically blogs can be used as a teaching and learning tool which was very well received.

Leo, a really enthusiastic undergraduate first year student was also showing his vision of how the existing 'my.wbs' - Warwick Business School's own online community, could be improved. As part of his presentation, he was showing how he has been using Google Wave in collaboration with other students for a course project.

To see it in action was truly mind blowing. I have been using Google documents to collaborate with friends but after seeing what I can do with Google Wave, I don't think I will be using Google documents any more. The thing that really excites me is the fact that this is still under development and as Leo pointed out, new features had just been rolled out. In other words, we were in the forefront of social media technology.

When they say real time, Google really means it. You can actually see what the other guy is typing in as they are actually typing it. I recently wrote a conference paper with my supervisor and we had to email each other back and forth with the revisions - me in my office and she at home. We could have saved a lot of time if we had been working together on the same document. Another great feature of Google Wave is that it automatically records what ever we are doing so we can go back and replay whatever we have done to review the process and the progress.

I definitely see myself Google Waving a lot more in the future.

Read the Google Wave blog for the latest updates.

2 comments:

Heru Kurniawan said...

wew,,excellent information! I never heard about it before. I learn from these article. google is great

Lukas said...

Yes, google is great, but I've already got quite a bit of Google. Soon as I open the fridge there, see also Google