There’s a lot of discussion taking place in the teaching and learning community about Google Wave. Google Wave is a new communications tool that’s a little hard to describe but I’d say it’s a combination of a real-time threaded discussion and wiki tool. Not only can you use the tool to reply to the postings of others (the “threaded discussion” part), but you can also edit the posts of others and even create collaborative documents (the “wiki” part). It’s a little tricky to get used to (the real time typing feature is disconcerting to many) and it’s still a little buggy (currently it’s still invitation only). Oh I must mention too the ability to embed media, share images, and embed “gadgets” which look like collaborative tools that are developed by the community to work with Google Wave (a “poll” tool is one that I have seen).
Google Wave possibilities
Like many early adopters that have been kicking the tires with this tool, I’ve been playing around while developing a small community of contacts to collaborate with. While I have yet to use this tool on any “real” projects, I think I’ve finally seen the light in terms of potential in my personal sphere of work and life. Let me elaborate.
Recently I returned from a somewhat extended vacation, during which I was largely out of touch with my workmates. As I was coming home on the train (a great way to travel if you have the opportunity, by the way), I started to feel the dread of returning to the office and sorting through the inevitable pile of e-mail. Don’t get me wrong, I love most aspects of my job, but e-mail is one of those things I tend to feel neutral-to-hostile towards. One of the things that is especially challenging is doing the detective work of piecing together an ongoing e-mail conversation. We’ve all seen it and dealt with it: the chain of “Reply All”s within a workgroup. Not only does this become inefficient over time, since most actors in the chain simply copy the same text over from earlier in the chain, but it’s terribly difficult, at least for me, to do the detective work of reconstructing the conversation as it happened over time. Essentially I end up reading “backwards” since my instinct is to read from top-to-bottom but this happens to be the reverse of the conversation timeline. (Incidentally, this is why Twitter is not a top tool within my personal learning environment – I face the same conundrum of trying to reconstruct conversations in reverse and generally find this frustrating.)
How I see Google Wave really working for me to overcome this scenario is that I can easily jump in or back in to a conversation and not feel like I really missed anything. Conversations are threaded so I can easily see the context of replies. I can even use the “playback” feature to get a sense for exactly how the conversation played out, when edits were made, etc. Essentially the conversation and the collaboration are all there in one place for my review. No need to don my “detective” hat and try to recreate based on the bits and pieces I’ve gathered. Sort of like putting my work on “Tivo” while I’m away.
I welcome your thoughts and comments, as I am still learning about this new tool.