Updated 5 August 2010
Lower down is a 30 May 2010 Guest Contribution by Ray Schroeder, Director, Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Here is Ray's reaction to Google's 4 August 2010 announcement that it would be stopping development of Wave.
This is really disappointing for those of us who have successfully used Wave for class and other collaborations. It is an especially useful tool for education. As a platform for a host of advanced multiple-media tools and with a wiki at its heart, Wave has served many of us in the past months.
Wave is a complex tool. Those who took the necessary time to learn the tool, found it to be especially robust and useful for many situations. Those who could only invest ten minutes in learning Wave were frustrated and confused.
The potential business and commerce applications were never made clear. Certainly, this was factor in the decision.
30 May 2010
Google Wave has been much discussed and speculated about since it was first announced just over one year ago. Many in the business community have wondered how it can be used for marketing and sales. Others have wondered how it will be integrated into daily communication and collaboration. Still others who lack the patience to test a tool with more than a few layers have wondered just what it is. Google developed the product as an answer to the question what would email look like if it were invented today rather than 40 years ago? (Trapani)
For those of us in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, the answer is clear. Google Wave can be described as a wiki-based platform for interactive multi-media (Web 2.0) tools. As with any good tool, Wave is versatile in application and adaptability. As with any good new tool, it is evolving and expanding.
In December of last year, I joined Brian Mulligan and Séan Conlan of the Institute of Technology at Sligo Ireland (IT Sligo) in a trans-Atlantic collaboration using Google Wave. We joined volunteers from our classes – an energy sustainability class at IT Sligo and my Internet in American Life class at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS) – in Google Wave.
The results are published in the journal e-Mentor (Schroeder). In brief, the collaboration was successful, though not without a few technical glitches. Students were engaged and enthused. Some real exchanges took place, even with the very early pre-release version of Wave. We identified some twenty Wave tools that seemed to hold significant potential for collaboration and group work in higher education.
In the six months since that very early experiment with Wave, many upgrades have been put in place and Wave has become a much more stable platform for collaboration. Google Wave is now openly available to the world. That’s not to say it was a secret or much of a closed system before (some three million users were signed on prior to the official opening of Wave on 17 May 2010). But now one can join Wave by logging in with any email address. You can add new users who had not previously been in Wave by typing in their email address. The newbies are immediately sent an invitation to create a logon.
It appears that we may be poised for an explosion of testing Google Wave in higher education this fall. Workshops and Webinars on the topic are proliferating. The Sloan Consortium in the U.S. has already offered three introductory Webinars on the topic this spring and a summer workshop is schedule for June. Enthusiasm has run high in those Webinars that I and two colleagues, Carrie Levin and Emily Boles, have hosted. The “Aunt Rosie” automatic language translation bot is among the popular tools supported by Wave. For group projects, the “playback” feature is also very popular, enabling the instructor to view a kind of time lapse version of how a final report was created, showing how and when each revision was made. The scores of other tools, from mind maps to iframes to voice and video recordings are easily accessible in the extensions folder provided to each user. These extensions will, no doubt, continue to expand as more and more third party providers add to this open source tool.
The question remains, how will we in education use this tool? I cannot presume to speak for the broader educational community, but I can share what new abilities are enabled by this technology and what I think are the most exciting prospects for this tool.
We have had wikis for years – and Google has already created a rather evolved form of the wiki in the form of Google Docs. We have an ever-expanding array of Web 2.0 and associated cloud-computing tools that are launched independently and supported individually by a whole host of providers. What is new with Wave is that these are brought together into one robust wiki-type platform that is open source and can be secured.
Rather than separate logons and locations for the array of Web 2.0 tools we may wish to employ in a class, we now have a single platform through which our classes can collaborate and utilize these tools: one logon; one URL. And, we can embed waves into our learning management system.
The most exciting uses of Wave, I believe, are the ones that break down classroom walls and institutional barriers. Just as we showed in joining classes between IT Sligo and UIS, there are no international or institutional boundaries with Wave. The collaboration potential is as broad as the Web itself. It is both a synchronous and asynchronous tool with live video, chat and language translation capabilities. As with all wikis, a history is kept of all activities for asynchronous review. With these capabilities, I see the opportunity to easily:
- Join classes within an institution. For example, a biology class could meet with an ethics class. The students could conduct a case study related to bio-ethics, merging the classical ethics approach with the high-tech aspects of cutting edge science. The faculty members could encourage the discussion and probing of issues that arise in the ethical pursuit of science.
- Join classes across institutional boundaries. For example, a 19th century American history class at one institution could join with a US Civil War history class at another institution for a couple of weeks to interact on the topic of the Lincoln presidency. The faculty members could encourage their students to engage with students in the other class to gain a breadth and depth of perspectives on the topic that would not normally be part of either class.
- Join foreign language classes. An English class in China could meet with a Chinese class in the UK. Cultural as well as language learning could take place.
The opportunities are endless. For the first time, the technology is in place to easily accomplish this kind of collaboration at the instructor and individual class level. In many institutions, creating a brief collaborative module can be done by the instructor without time-consuming proposals, governance reviews, and inhibiting technological issues. It is no more complex than arranging for a guest speaker to address your class. But, in this case, you are reaching out anywhere on the globe (or the campus) to create a planned (or spontaneous) collaboration that add depth and richness to the learning in your class.
schroeder.ray[AT]uis.edu or rayschroeder[AT]googlewave.com
References
Schroeder, R, Mulligan, B, & Conlan, S. (2010). Waving the google flag for inter-institutional class collaborations. e-Mentor, 7(1), ISSN 1731-6758. Also available online: http://www.e-mentor.edu.pl/33,723,Waving_the_Google_Flag_forInter-institutional_Class_Collaborations.html
Trapani, G. (2010). The Complete guide to google wave [First Edition]. Retrieved from http://completewaveguide.com/guide/The_Complete_Guide_to_Google_Wave
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