Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Wikis, Collaborative Writing and Publishing: Using Web 2.0 Tools


First off, let me congratulate you on a fine presentation tonight. I think you all did a great job on coordinating the activities in your presentation. I thought the activities were really fun although sometimes frustrating. I realize the difficulty in trying to present the number of technologies you wanted to in the time allotted. The main idea that sticks in my mind is none of these technologies work well on their own for all purposes.
What you did was ask us to collaborate with our group members without a true collaboration tool. While Google Groups would work fine to communicate with each other over a period of time, it did not work well in the short time we had. Your group may look at this as a shortcoming in the presentation; I thought it made one thing very clear. Without the use of IM or cell phones we were pretty much all in the dark. We did what most businesses would do, we used other means at hand adapted and moved on.
I realize Lois stated, “She thought we had enough to contend with and didn’t want us to have to deal with another tool”, but sometimes it is necessary to have an arsenal of web tools at your fingertips. I think the activity showed this in a phenomenal way. As I reflect on this, if you were to present this in the future I am not sure that this isn’t the best way to show how one Web 2.0 tool cannot do everything on its own. Although you may want to include this was why you did it in this fashion.
Again, great job and a fun learning experience. Look forward to reading everyone else’s post.

2 comments:

Patricia Kloeckner said...

Really great input, Pat. I found it fairly easy to work with just google groups and docs, but maybe that's because I was already in the mindset of distance communication without cell phones or IM. As you said, it can be effective at a distance, if you will be using it, like say, all day.

Steve A said...

Pat,

You hit the nail on the head. Google groups is designed as a tool for sharing information with others, but it's not a great synchronous collaboration tool. If we had been given other tools to complement it, I think it would have been a better experience.

Steve