Say goodbye to Microsoft Word.
As kairosnews reports, Google has announced a new conversation and collaboration application that runs in your browser, called Google Wave--and being a beach kid, the title alone is enough to get me excited. You can click on the link above or go here to watch the demo, but be warned: it's long (an hour and twenty minutes). If you want to get a quicker feel for things, check out the write-up on Tech Crunch, which, although also long, makes for much easier skimming than the video.
Or, you can take my word for it: basically Google Wave takes the capabilities of a word processor, email, and instant messaging and lumps them all into one, with the added value of easy linking capabilities to blogs, social networks, and other documents/conversations. What's more, updates occur in real time, up to the letter, so you don't have to wait while your fellow IMer "is typing." Oh, and it's open source, for those of you concerned with such things (it remains to be seen whether or not the content of a wave will be open to Google and hence fodder for ads customized to you, as seems to be the case with Google Profile).
For my part, I'm excited about the possibilities this holds for classrooms: imagine, students produce a document--a draft--and peers can comment on that draft either in real time or asynchronously, offering suggestions, making corrections, and the like. The student can then make changes, and have the successive stages of the writing process catalogued right there. And, once it's done, she can publish it to her class blog as a finished document, after which I can add comments to the blog itself or the document, publicly or privately, for purposes of grading. No Microsoft Word. No worries about crashed computers. Nothing to download or upload. No stacks of papers to carry around, so no worries about printer jams or busy computer labs. And this only scratches the surface. Once the app is released, I definitely plan on playing with it and seeing to what extent it can be useful for pedagogy. Good stuff.
Wendy Kozol’s The War In-Between
2 years ago
This sounds really interesting. I'm wondering what your thoughts are about plagiarizing and if this application could increase it. I'm honestly torn about the matter of that sort of online submission. Obviously, we allow students to read each others' papers for peer review, but that is typically in hard copy. Do you see it as too tempting to allow students to basically download an entire class of papers? I think this discussion is probably best had when the application is actually released and we can look at it, but I thought I would air my immediate concerns. I'll be on the look out for the first version of this!
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