Google

More Waving

/ Cole Camplese / 9 Comments

Thanks much for the comments from yesterday’s post! Seems there is real interest in the Google Wave platform out there in ed tech land. One thing that is striking me as interesting are the number of comments I’m getting these days via Twitter … what excites me is that people are reading in the moment and are compelled to share a short thought with me.

@colecamplese great commentary cole. Thanks for translating to .edu space! (from @Clifhirtle)

What concerns me is that these are comments that could potentially move the conversation further if left within the context of the blog post. And in that statement I am making the case for what I understand Wave to be — a platflorm that will allow for in stream communication that will filter back into context. This is amazing to me in and of itself. Today I figured out that it will be relatively easy for us to run our own Wave instance … this will (presumably) give us a layer of control that could empower a whole new level of openness and conversation in our classrooms.

The old thinking of commenting where I need you to could be destroyed — and that is an amazingly scary thought. I love it.

The big talk across the edublog space is that it could mean the end of the LMS. I’ll just say it, that’s crazy talk. What it probably means is that we might get a better footing in the LMS contract world and that we’ll have new opportunities to innovate. This platform can do quite a bit for us in the teaching and learning space, but as far as I can tell it probably will not be suited for testing on a real scale and it probably cannot replace the basics of the LMS definition — learner management. We need the LMS to do lots of things, but we also need new tools to support pedagogy that works to engage students. I think Wave will begin to even the playing field so that we have easy to use teaching and learning platforms alongside our real need to manage assessment, participation, and the like. Wave represents a new opportunity.

I am thinking quite a bit about a post by colleague Michael Feldstein … I think it and the comments should be part of any of our push to understand these changes. Its worth a read and a discussion. As always I am happy to hear thoughts!

Google Wave

/ Cole Camplese / 13 Comments

I’ve worked really hard over the last couple of days to make sense of the Google Wave demo from the weekend. I’ve actually taken three days to watch the demo and I have to say I am both a bit stunned and impressed. Clearly this is a huge move and one that has big implications for all of us in the .edu space. If it will be ultimately successful as a product I can’t say quite yet — I was not lucky enough to be there and to get a developer account. I’m not even going to attempt to do a review or an overview … there are plenty of those available online and the demo gives a good a view as you are going to get for the time being.

There are a couple of things I do want to throw out as reactions and see if anyone else is thinking about this stuff — and I will be wanting to talk about it when we run into each other. The first thing that comes to mind is how obvious this all is — I mean once I’d seen it. They released the tool that so many people I spend time with are always talking about, typicaly in terms like “wouldn’t it be cool if we could just edit this document in real time and just blah, blah, blah.” In so many ways, it is a real representation of the many conversations I’ve had the last several years. Once I started to see how documents could be authored in such a naturally collaborative fashion I was sold. I’ve honestly not seen something so paradigm bending in a single demo in quite a long time.

Just the portion of the demo where they are collaboritivly editing a Wave that gets instantly published to a blog is mind blowing. When anyone can wander up to that blog post and drop comments or edits and it flows back into the Wave I was beyond astonished. I can now use a blog for a big class and have every single conversation happen in real time either in that blog or in my Wave client (if that is even a real thing). Instead of browsing to sites (even via an RSS reader) I can just stay in Wave and watch all of the conversations happen. Everything I need to do can live there — I think. If it really does pull together email, Twitter, and Herculean-powered google doc like features then I can only begin to see how this can change how we use technology in the classroom. Sign me up for that as my google for education suite — you can keep the rest.

And that is one of the other things that just blows my mind … Google previewed something that could make so much of their other stuff obsolete (even before much of it comes out of beta). Honestly, why would I use separate spaces for email, collaborative document creation, project management, communication, publishing, form building, and conversations of every shape and size when I can simply live in the Wave environment. Until I see it I can’t say for sure, but so far I am impressed.

As I was watching the demo I was hanging out with my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald. Scott and I taught a course together that has gotten some press for our use of Twitter … as we are watching this demo we kept chomping at the bit to give it a go next Spring. What it left me wondering was if this will be viewed as a massively disruptive environment like nearly all the other social platforms are, or if it will be welcomed into our teaching and learning environments? It seems to have so much of what we’d want from a platform that the implications for our work is enormous. I have to say I am very anxious to see how it plays with several of the ideas Scott and I have been tossing around.

The timing is amazing as well … just as we and so many others are entering into transitional periods with our LMS/CMS environments Wave has come along and shattered our notions of what it means to use the web as a platform to empower real time conversations. I know the traditional systems cannot catch up to something like this in time, it is quite frankly just too damn insane of an environment for them to latch onto. This isn’t like bolting a blogging platform to an existing code base, this is about rethinking the way we do things together face to face and online. It is about completely rethinking learning, teaching, authoring, sharing, collaborating, and so much more. I wonder if the rest of you feel as energized by the potential? From where I am sitting, this could be the start of what is next on so many levels.

Partly Cloudy

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

I started last month writing quite a bit about living my life in the cloud with my new MacBook Air. I’m now even further into this experiment and I show little sign of turning back. There are a few things that continue to confound me — when I travel, for example, I take a ton of pictures and don’t want to dump them to the Air, but I have little other choice. I hate the idea of having multiple digital versions of the pictures … this seems like a silly thing, but trying to go completely into the cloud isn’t going to work for me. Keynote presentations are a whole other issue, but let’s just say I need to have at least a half dozen or more stacks so I can assemble presentations to fit the audience. And no, Google Presenter isn’t going to work (yet). So I guess at this point I can’t say I have left all local applications behind, but Microsoft Office is no longer part of my routine.

What really prompted this post is Google’s announcement of their Chrome open source browser project. What I find interesting about it is that it really looks like a micro-operating system to me. In other words, it will have built in functionality that will allow it to run web applications at new speeds with layers of protection that are usually reserved for an operating system. I’m no specialist here, but the fact that they are writing their own javascript engine (even though webkit already has one) tells me they want to make working with google web apps feel like working on the desktop. Imagine the Google Applications running in a browser that has its javascript tuned perfectly for performance from the applications … and then add full on Google Gears support and their little browser can now do anything you local app sitting on the OS can do.

If Chrome is successful, I imagine we’ll see new breeds of devices that can take advantage of the Chrome/Gears combo in new ways. I know I won’t be switching to it for full time browsing, but as my life in the cloud experiment continues I will be exploring it as the alternative for working with my Google Apps. It doesn’t look like a Mac version will be first out of the gate, but when it hits I’ll be ready. Any thoughts on this one?

Collaboration in the Cloud

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I am going to continue to explore the Blogs at Penn State as a note and workflow tool to support in and out of the classroom work … I am going to focus on something a little different than the individually focused approach I discussed last week. Collaboration within the context of coursework among our students seems to be growing on campus. This is encouraging because it seems to me that it points to new approaches in our classrooms and indicates that more faculty are encouraging students to work together to solve interesting challenges. I think cooperative problem solving is a 21st century skill, so helping students develop them while in college is critical. The FACAC survey indicates that both undergraduate at 40% and graduate students at 56% report sharing documents to complete coursework. What we didn’t dig into was how they are sharing documents to complete coursework, but from my experiences in the classroom it is probably to wrong way — emailing them back and forth still seems to be the norm.

Last week I was thinking out loud about students creating individual blogs to be used as notebooks across their classes. Today I’d like to ask how blogs could be used to create a team or group based set of collaborative opportunities to support coursework. I have a couple things in mind and would be more than happy to expand on any of them as a follow up post.

With the Fall release of the Blogs at PSU anyone can easily add additional authors to a blog so they can contribute, edit, create, or manage posts. I would love to see students skip using Word as a “collaborative” tool and find new ways to work together. Blogs aren’t ideal for collaborative authoring, but I can’t see how they are worse than passing Word documents back and forth. Collaboration can be easily achieved via multiple posts, comments, or even by managing drafts. This is an area we should be investigating more.

The best tool I’ve seen for true collaboration is the word processor in the Google Docs suite. With an email address it is easy to set up an account and even easier to add others to the document. More and more Universities are signing up with Google under the Apps for Education program … we’re thinking about what it would mean to be a part of that world and there are some very interesting opportunities there. The funny thing is as I walked into a meeting with some folks from Google I was thinking that the best part of the suite had nothing to do with email, but with the google docs tools. It was great to hear they feel the same way. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they think real collaboration happens during the document creation, not after.

If you’ve never used the word processing application in Google docs then you’re missing quite a bit. It has all the power of Word, but cloud based and the ability to actively collaborate. What that means is that people can be in the same document at the same time and see each other’s changes. Where things get really interesting is that a document can be instantly published into a blog. That means teams can work in the best collaborative tool on the web for group writing and then push it into a personal repository (Blogs at Penn State). The document can be edited repeatedly in Google Docs and instantly republished into the blog. This combination of group and personal editing is a big step forward for empowering collaboration and taking advantage of personal repositories.

Publishing from Google Docs to Blogs at PSU

Publishing from Google Docs to Blogs at PSU

I’d really like to hear more about ideas and scenarios where we could more actively explore these ideas. We are building quite a team within ETS to explore how blogs can impact teaching, learning, and scholarship in general. Help us form the right kinds of opportunities to continue exploring.

Collaborative Data Gathering: Now Easy

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

Most of us have used the suite of tools under the Google Docs moniker to do all sorts of collaborative things. Giving us a web-based, multi-user version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint has been a good thing. I’ve had my ups and downs with the tools since the Writely days, but I think in general they are a very powerful and flexible set of tools. This is so clear when working in committee or as a student working in teams — the idea that you don’t have to shuffle individual documents back and forth is an amazing benefit.

Yesterday during class we demonstrated the Google Docs suite to the students … most of them had seen them and we didn’t see too many jaws drop until I showed a new feature of the spreadsheet app — the ability to create web forms that actually dumps data back into the originating spreadsheet. This new feature was announced by Google just a few days ago and it makes the act of collecting data very straightforward and I would even say stretches into the online survey space. I read this morning over at Daring Fireball that there appears to be a 5,000 row limit, but that is a hell of a lot more data collection than you can do in many free survey tools.

It is so easy to make work … just create your spreadsheet and share it. In the sharing area you can now select an option “to fill out a form.” That’s it … select it, get the URL and send it out. Amazing that if you are in the google spreadsheet as people are filling out the form you see the data come in. I created a little form to test it out … fill it out for me! It also appears as though you can publish the spreadsheet with the data live updating.

web_form_google.png

One thing I don’t see that would really make this even more handy is a little web clip of code that I could drop my form on my blog or in a place like ANGEL. I checked it on my iPhone and the layout is great and it works … sweet for mobile data gathering applications. Nice little step forward.

Enabling 1,000 People

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

The GPhone was supposed to be something else! Google was going to build a mobile that would crush Apple, Microsoft, and others in the mobile OS market … instead they built an alliance (sounds a lot like their recently announced Open Social project) and promised to provide a mobile OS in an open source model. Doing so does something amazing … according to Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, “We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone.” Powerful and interesting … couple it with partnerships with T-Mobile, Sprint, and the world’s largest mobile operator, China Mobile and we may have something here. You know their apps will run perfectly on it — and so will the delivery of mobile, targeted advertisements. The game will get interesting here … good to see the mobile space finally getting some forward movement.

First Signs of Google Presenter

/ Cole Camplese / 8 Comments

I was going through my feeds and saw a little post over at TechCrunch that brought to light the fact that Gmail can now show browser based slideshows from attached PPT documents. So, I fired up PowerPoint (wow, that hurt my head) and created a quick little three frame slide show. I then sent it to myself at Gmail … when it arrived I saw this:

slides_gmail.png

Notice that little, “View as slideshow” link? It opened up my PPT file in a new browser tab and it looked surprisingly like the original. It killed the transitions, but for letting someone view slides quickly and easily this is a big step forward. I guess if you have PPT installed and you are on a PC, this sort of thing is common. But to tell you the truth, I am hearing more and more people say they have abadonded the whole Office suite lately. Having this work in the browser w/o having the suite makes it all very nice. When I clicked the link this is what I got:

slides_gmail02.jpg

Looks like we are closer to an online presentation tool that works. I wonder if this will lead people to jump off the Office bandwagon?

Google Moves

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

No, they aren’t leaving their sprawling campus … they just continue to make moves in the whole enterprise support space. When they bought Writely and turned it into Google Docs it was interesting. Then there was Spreadsheet and just the other day they announce Google Presentations. This morning I was sent email by several people that pointed to various reports of Google making another big move — this time they purchased Marratech.

If you are unaware, Marratech is a cross-platform desktop conferencing and collaboration environment. It allows people to do all sorts of things such as video conference, share desktops, applications, presentations, and other things in that space. It appears to me as though we are starting to see a major push by Google to own the new suite of business applications — all managed and accessed via your Google identity (Gmail account). We’ll have to keep an eye on how this one starts to shake down.