Posts Tagged ‘chat’

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Google Wave and University

In Post on 2009-12-06 by Elle Tagged: , ,

Café Area Saltire Centre Glasgow Caledonian University

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.

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Retro” Chat for Google Wave

In Link on 2009-10-20 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

One of the biggest com­plaints from first time Google Wave users is the tidal wave of infor­ma­tion and updates that threat­ens to suck their pre­cious time away as they watch the chaos unfold.

In a care­fully tended wave, the noise and chaos are min­i­mal, but in some of the larger (pub­lic) waves, users have given up hop of ever keep­ing on top of it all.

Charles Lehner has cre­ated a sim­ple chat gad­get that might help calm the swell, by focussing some of the chat into a form most of us will recog­nise: IM. By intro­duc­ing this gad­get to a wave, you can give peo­ple an out­let to speak that brings in years of built up con­ven­tion for man­ag­ing the flow. Peo­ple under­stand Instant Mes­sag­ing, so you can add this gad­get to bring  nor­malcy to the new medium.

Per­haps you could embed this in a wave and encour­age peo­ple to use it for idle chitchat, leav­ing the rest of the wave for the real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion on the task at hand.

As with other gad­gets the Play­back func­tion records every new per­son who gets to the chat, and every mes­sage, so be aware that this can blow the size of your wave record­ing out with a lot of extra updates to wade through if necessary.

“Retro” Chat for Google Wave [Wave Sam­ples Gallery]