Hello and welcome to this week's discussion on AU Online Learning.
Last week in class I discussed how I used Google Documents to streamline my group project. To remind everyone- the project was a group conflict analysis. The original format of the project as given to us by our professor was to generate a spreadsheet covering each week's reading topics and apply them to our conflict. Each week we would send our professor a copy of our document.
We originally used this service to eliminate the need to email drafts of our reseach document back and forth, however it also had a number of unexpected, but very the beneficial consequences. One of these was of giving us the ability to work simultaneously and hold online discussions while doing so as Google Documents has an integrated chat setting which allows for communication between group members as we're working.
Google Docs is also a great way of sharing your own personal notes with a group. Here is an example from the Georgia conflict project.
I found this project to be one of the most rewarding of my projects at American University, in no small part because of this tool. The tool made group work easier and eliminated the need for most meetings outside of class hours. Rather than decreasing in group communication it actually increased the exchange of our ideas. It was interesting to see what each group member was contributing each week. This fueled a number of debates within our groups as we challenged each others perceptions and analyses. This was especially valuable, given the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives.
Since Google Documents is integrated with their other services such as Google's Picasa (a slideshow example is placed below) your students have plenty of room to come up with their own innovations.
At the Social Science Research lab Google Docs has been used in a number of ways to deal with the logistics of group work. Examples of this approach have been skill inventories and sign up sheets.
Altogether I've found Google Documents to be a great tool for making group more transparent and more collaborative.
I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts, questions, reflections and experiences.
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11 comments:
I found last week's presentation very useful. I haven't used Google Docs collaboratively but have used it to create "getting to know you" questionnaires for classes. The ability to create forms from spreadsheets was especially useful for this.
Nicole Melander's presentation referenced Zoho.com, which seems to have some of the same cloud applications as Google Docs. Has anyone tried any of the Zoho applications; and if so, how do they compare with Google Docs?
At first glance, the Zoho looks to be targeting enterprise users more than individuals. It'll be interesting to see how the next version of the Microsoft Office suite incorporate some of the same functionality as Google Docs; the advantage to users might be that they won't lose more advanced formatting by collaborating with Google Docs.
Edwin
I'm interested in how your experience with chatting while group-editting a Google Doc compares to GoToMeeting, and whether the Google Doc chat facility will work with larger groups (say, 30 to 50).
I have a (pedantic) question that has recently come up. A lot of the students in the organization I mentor use Google Docs to send each other both their own work and work done by other people- is there an issue with intellectual property rights outside of the existing norm?
@edwin -- Zoho offers a broad suite of tools beyond those provided by Google. I like their breadth and integration they offer. Google docs continues to improve and is currently, in my opinion, a good small group (3 or 4 students) collaborative tool. Microsoft already offers some free web based tools under Microsoft Live with more to come. My understanding is that Microsoft plans to limit functionality to a lightweight version of the Office suite for web based. Anything more sophisticated will require the full suite.
@Brian -- I personally think the edit/chat integration in all tools is still lacking. It's an intellectual challenge to think about how to manage and display a simultaneous conversation among a large group (like the 30 or 50 you reference).
@Susan -- This isn't my area of expertise but I believe the IP rights get shared once a document is shared with edit capabilities. There is still a document "owner" who holds the primary rights.
Great conversation. Keep the comments coming!
@ Brian Yates
Google Documents' chat function is pretty old-fashioned, which like Nicole said is pretty basic. I found it serviceable for our group of five people, but could see how it would quickly get unmanageable with a larger group. I imagine the size of the group that you'd want to participate would be proportionate to the amount of work you'd want each person to do. Sign up sheets or notes would give one few problems with large groups. But I can't imagine doing an in-depth project like the one I presented with thirty people.
@ Nicole
With Office, you can share documents trough Microsoft's Office Live service (like Google you can get an account by signing up for an hotmail account with them). There are similar sharing functions, plus the ability to share screens. I haven't really worked with this service yet but my first impression is that the documents are a polished (as they are full office documents).
However it doesn't look like it can be used to edit documents online- but rather drops them in your own version of office- once you install the patch from their site. Thus its only a viable collaborative tool if all of your group already has access office 2007. It also doesn't support publishing pages to the web.
So, it would appear to me that Office Live may be better at sharing files, but perhaps not as good as Google Docs at collaborating. I think its a rather subtle and rather interesting distinction.
@Brian -- One advantage of Google Docs is that it is free and easily accessible where as GoToMeeting is free for 30 days and then costs if I am not mistaken. Your point of making a large group collaboration activity session work is well taken.
@Susan -- We are having the library representatives come in next week for our face to face session, we can bring up the copyright question.
I love Blogger and my old personal blog has been converted onto Blogger. some friends without gmail accounts had difficulty leaving comments but I assume since our students are already on gmail this should not be a problem. correct?
@dotty - Students can have a gmail, yahoo, or twitter account to leave comments. Or they may choose OpenID, when prompted type their name in and then leave a comment.
I find this medium absolutely fascinating. Google Docs appears to have what I need, when I need it. The problem is how to get students to use it. My concern is that Google Docs technology keeps changing rapidly and must also compete with other similar sites. How do I get students to choose the right site and the one that serves their learning objectives? Is there a list out there of all such sites by way of their effectiveness?
Kamal
I, too, find Google Docs fascinating--but overwhelming. It appears that I will be signing up for more courses on how to use it effectively:-)
Michelle Newton-Francis
I use Google docs frequently for communication and bookkeeping for my chamber ensemble. This is very effective for us. I have started to use it for my ensemble at AU as well at their suggestion and request. I am sure that I will use it for this class as well. I like the integrated all-in-one-place element to google even if some other specialty sites are more advanced.
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