As I play around with Google Wave, I have been asked by colleagues about the value of it. While I have been able to offer a brief sketch of it, I was a bit stumped by a colleague who said that she couldn’t see any value in this to educators. I was pleased to see a recent article in Wired Campus (“How to Teach with Google Wave” by Marc Perry) that addresses that very issue. Two classes, one in Illinois that was studying the Internet in American Life and one in Ireland that was studying energy, spent two weeks discussing the impact of the Internet on energy sustainability. The immediate question that sprang to my mind was how was this any different from other collaboration tools? The article had an answer for that:
- “Plenty of other technologies already enable online collaboration, like wikis and Web conferencing. The difference is that Google Wave dumps everything into a one-stop Web 2.0 sandbox of audio and video and text. Also, it’s free. And it has a “playback” feature that lets you watch the history of each posting in a kind of time-lapse animation.”
Interesting…
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 