First Waves

While attempt­ing to com­plete my first group assign­ment as an exter­nal stu­dent at Uni­ver­sity, I realised how much harder it was than while I was an inter­nal stu­dent.  If you’re an inter­nal stu­dent you see each other at least once a week,  mak­ing it hard to ignore the fact you have an upcom­ing assign­ment. Also you actu­ally get to meet and talk with peo­ple and elect  to be in their group (if the group selec­tion process is left to the stu­dents). Being exter­nal, I had to post a ran­dom post on the dis­cus­sion board and hope I was choos­ing the right peo­ple. And then hope they didn’t ignore my emails or wait a month or so to reply.

Google Wave would have been one of the best tools for this group assign­ment. Email meant a group of four peo­ple were all indi­vid­u­ally email­ing each other and also at times email­ing all four of the group. I ended up with snap­shots of what was hap­pen­ing, who was hav­ing what role, and what the plan was. With Google Wave, all the com­mu­ni­ca­tion would have been in one Wave, or even mul­ti­ple, but it would have been avail­able for the group to read and to add and edit. The plan of the assign­ment, of who was writ­ing what, and how we were writ­ing it could have been kept at the top of the wave, and edited as needed. The parts assigned to indi­vid­u­als could have been put in the wave and the group could know exactly where the assign­ment was up to, and edit other’s parts as we went.

The two main fea­tures of Google Wave which would have pos­i­tive affects on a uni­ver­sity group assign­ment, would have been the real time edit­ing and the abil­ity to high­light. Real time made it more like con­ver­sa­tion, with­out hav­ing to wait for emails to be sent, or hav­ing to work out who could pos­si­ble meet in the City to catch up. High­light­ing would allow those edits to be promi­nent or for indi­vid­u­als to rein­force any point they needed to make.