Blackboard Doesn’t Let Your Mother Help You With Your Homework Either!
November 15, 2007
Blackboard is no better than using email to share Word files when it comes to helping you and your colleagues write a paper or grant application: neither control access nor keep track of versions, and any time two or more authors try to edit a file they either have to send new versions to everyone using email, which means everyone has to sort through versions in the email, and worry about wiping out each other’s work when uploading new versions. Enterprise systems solve the problem by “locking” files once they’ve been checked out, but as I witnessed at the Microsoft booth at the Web 2.0 Expo, such systems require a lot of time figuring out permissions, naming, and versioning conventions — a truly cumbersome arrangement for such detailed levels of control, as anyone will agree if they’ve had to sit through the standard 8-hour NPS training.But the very sweet guys who came all the way from India to show Zoho Writer and its extended family of cost-free, web-based office and group applications at the Expo last week, came up with an ingenious, social software solution: if someone else tries to check out a file that you are editing, a real-time connection between the two of you is established, a chat window pops up, and the two of you can talk about who wants to do what right then and there.To be sure, if I’m working with a zillion people designing a nuclear missile with limited personal contact and maybe even less trust I might need all those complicated not-so-automatic-nor-easy technical controls, but for headworkers who are writing up the conversation they’ve had or are about to have, such direct communication is infinitely preferable: offering a chance to coordinate contributions, say “hi!”, and raise other relevant issues … greetings and discussions and social dimensions that automated systems are designed to ignore and shut down.So, don’t keep any secrets from your mother! Read “Checking the Kids’ Homework Over the Internet”!, and check out Zoho Writer!
December 3, 2007 at 2:48 pm
December 4, 2007 at 11:33 am
good wikis are able to handle concurrent edits. Content is merged automatically, and where that fails, the second one to save is asked to resolve the conflict manually.
See for example http://www.twiki.org/
I guess the biggest problem doing that with Word documents is the incomprehensible file format. OpenOffice.org doesn’t have that problem, and since there’s tools automatically converting OOo documents to websites (including pictures, and it looks good within the boundary of pre-defined styles), I wouldn’t be sure you can already find what you need…
January 7, 2008 at 11:02 am
And for a fine little video on YouTube explaining why collaborative work is better done with onlline applications like Google Docs,
Google Docs In Plain English. And for more like this, visit Commoncraft.
March 4, 2008 at 10:30 pm
And then there’s this fine commentary by Brian Lamb on the dead end of LMS systems, (http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php)
@Lanny, my point is that this insane desire to keep educational environments closed and highly managed is not only ethically dubious but also creates headaches. I have taught a course in WebCT the past four years, and it forces me to enter a password, provide something like ten clicks (waiting each time for the thing to load) just to see if someone has added to a discussion. I literally could check up on a dozen blogs in the time it take me to get my first look at course activity. And you’d have to be huffing gold paint to think it is easier to author in one of these CMS’s than it is in WordPress or MediaWiki. So yes, the squeeze on practitioner time is a huge issue, which makes the endless hassles we cause ourselves by clinging to a closed model all the more problematic. Imagine if all the IT/support positions presently filled by people fighting bugs and addressing bewildered user questions were instead creative people using lighter and simpler open tools. Or imagine what kind of time/strategy options would open up to us if we weren’t paying out these licensing fees, or having to support the kind of infrastructure these heavy systems require.