Cole W. Camplese

My Last Google Wave Post

Damn Google Wave, I hardly knew you. After all the hype it is now gone. Google canned Wave about two years after they first showed it off to cheers. I recall watching the demo while on vacation and being blown away. The pieces that were shown were literally transformative in their execution. Too bad people just didn't get it in a mainstream sort of way. Not that I really did after I finally got into the developers' sandbox. If I am honest, I haven't even logged into Wave in the last six months. It never made its way into my workflow and it never solved any sort of problem for me.

At the end of the day it failed to fill any sort of void for most people and I think that has to do with the fact that it wasn't built to fill a void. It was built to be transformative and mind blowing. I am convinced that aspects of Wave will make their way into Google Docs, Sites, Gmail, and their other properties -- you know, the tools that were built to do specific things. Imagine Docs with a Wave like panel that allowed teams to dialogue in real language while co-authoring something. That's a feature I could use right now.

I am actually really impressed that Google killed it so quickly (and sad) ... sort of restored my faith in the fact that they release stuff as beta and in this case saw it just wasn't happening. I need to eat a little crow at how much attention I paid to it in its pre-release days, telling everyone how much this was going to change things. In the end it did a ton of stuff, just not for a ton of people. Again, seems amazing to me that Google could just kill it. Maybe that is the transformative lesson to learn here?

Google Wave Use Cases: Education

I think it is safe to say it is time for us all to look beyond the hype and to ignore the people pissing all over Wave and start to discover how we'll use this new space.

CogDog talks about disappointment and even I got into a little Twitter sparring with Stephen Downes over what is/isn't. I think we'll know more and (a) more of us get account and (b) new extensions emerge that live on top of this platform. The piece quoted below starts the conversation that I think we need to continue to have.

Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let's start with the education sector. We'll explore other use cases in upcoming posts.

From Google Wave Use Cases: Education .

Really Riding Google Wave

Its been several weeks now that I've had a developer account on Google's sandbox implementation of Wave and thought I'd share some more thoughts than the random tweets. I hope I'm not violating any sort of NDA by doing this because I think it is important to start the dialogue on something as potentially transformative as Wave as early as possible. Let me start by saying that when I first got my account I was extremely underwhelmed for a few reasons, but after using it now for weeks I am converted and find myself extremely frustrated that it isn't really ready for wide release. The primary reason I was underwhelmed was that I had no one to work Wave with ... sure there were hundreds of developers in there, but no one that I would participate with in any meaningful way. Wave is a collaborative platform and without collaborators it is close to useless. Now that a couple of ETS colleagues are also in the developer release I can say I am sold.

Real Time Rocks

Chat has always been useful, but in the context of a Wave the notion of real time conversation is kicked into a whole new dimension. I can't overstate this enough, the ability to co-author a document and work through decision making is game changing. I've been using Google Docs as my writing platform for a couple of years now -- going so far in the last 18 months of eliminating Office from my laptop. Wave gives you an even easier way to manage collaboration and collaborators through a drag and drop interface for adding people to the document. The thing that blows it all up (in a good way) is the ability to drop out of the flow of the document and have a real time threaded conversation but still within the framework of the document itself. Brad Kozlek and I worked through an idea in a single Wave the other day that would have taken hours and dozens of emails instead of the 15 minutes it took by doing it in Wave. Real time workflow is the thing that has me craving more people in my network.

If you are using Wave by yourself you'll never get it. I think of how different it has been since Chris Millet and Brad have gotten their accounts ... we were sitting in a meeting the other day with a shared Google Doc running and we were all stepping on each others' edits. I started a single Wave shared with Chris and Brad that allowed us to take notes in our own way within the same document without a real worry about formatting or placement. When lots of people get into a single Google Doc things can get messy, but it seems more well contained in a Wave.

I am really excited about how this will play out in a class. I can easily envision a Wave shared with a group of students that will let them take notes, have conversations, share resources, and be generally engaged behind their screens. If I think of what made the Twitter usage so powerful last time I taught I can easily map a more interesting and longer lasting scenario onto a shared class Wave. Students were using Twitter to mostly share resources, give each other encouragement, and to have sidebar conversations ... in the Wave all that happens, but it is a shared document that can be revisited within the context of a larger learning opportunity. I've been lamenting how disconnected the Twitter channel feels after the event has occurred ... with a Wave, I think you have a more lasting artifact that is a hybrid of the "in the moment" Twitter activity and the reflective blog post that happens after the learning. I am very eager to see this with a much larger group within a learning environment.

Extensions are Crazy

One of the things I am still wrapping my head around is how easy it seems to be to do interactive things within a given Wave. If you've not seen the demo the Wave team gave then you are missing out on seeing how easy it is to insert small pieces of interactive content that allows you to extend the metaphor of a document into a more robust and engaging environment. It is hard to explain, but imagine a group of students taking collaborative notes, having a conversation, and being able to plot their work on a graph all at the same time within the same Wave. Think about asking questions and having them answer with a single click within a Wave ... the whole thing just bends the idea of what it means to work in a single space. Brad was able to publish his Wave into his Penn State blog without a whole lot of trouble ... that is interesting, but the same functionality you have within the Wave environment itself is then instantly available from within his blog post. What that means is that whatever you can do within the Wave, you can do from within his blog.

What all this means to me is that (a) I am now ruined until the Wave really comes out and (b) I can't imagine going back to other environments for doing collaboration. Is it a bigger leap than Google Docs were for writing when it hit as Writely years ago? Perhaps. The problem I see is that I am still asking people if they use Docs and they say no. I can't imagine at this point of passing around a Word document to get business done and I know for a fact I won't want to send emails and use Docs when we can do real time collaboration and conversation in a Wave. Getting from here to a time when this is how we all work will be difficult. Honestly, I can say that this is the next big game changer and once it hits going back to the old way will be very, very difficult.

It is On

Google Wave invite came today. Best question, how do you want to be contacted? Check box for email and a checkbox for Wave. Guess what I selected!

Chrome is Fast

Last night I spent some time with "the not ready for prime time" version of Google Chrome for Mac OSX. I didn't think I'd like it on any level, but have heard that it is really fast using the Google tools. I can say that it is fast, really fast when using the Google suite -- Reader, Docs, Calendar, and iGoogle. All were noticeably faster than what I am used to with Safari. After playing with this early build I am already convinced Google is on to something with a browser that is optimized for web applications. I know for a fact that I'll be spending quite a bit of time in Chrome once it when it gets a bit more stable.

I've never been much of a Firefox fan, so the idea of using a non-Safari browser hasn't really been high on my list. But if Chrome continues to progress and if the features continue to develop I'll use it quite a bit. I've stepped away from using Office except for very rare occasions so having a faster and more feature rich browser to live in Docs is very appealing to me. This could essentially be the space a good portion of my productivity and collaboration happens -- especially after Google Wave comes along.

If you'll indulge me for a minute there is one thing the notion of a browser built for specific purposes reminds me of ... an idea I had over ten years ago -- a browser built to support education. It seems insane now that we'd need such a thing, but back in 1998 bandwidth was scarce and the level of interactivity was very low (unless you embedded a bunch of shockwave pieces). What I was thinking about was a client application that had all sorts of standard functionality built in that a simple text file could unlock. If you needed to do complex in-browser activities, the browser itself had the functionality and the text file would simply provide the content and the context to let it happen. All the tracking would have happened on the client side and be pushed to the server when a network connection was available. Seems hilarious now, but it seemed to make so much sense at the time. I know it is funny, but lots of ideas look silly after progress ... I wonder if all the stuff we are hyped about now will look insane in 10 years?

More Waving

Thanks much for the comments from yesterday's post! Seems there is real interest in the Google Wave platform out there in ed tech land. One thing that is striking me as interesting are the number of comments I'm getting these days via Twitter ... what excites me is that people are reading in the moment and are compelled to share a short thought with me.

@colecamplese great commentary cole. Thanks for translating to .edu space! (from @Clifhirtle)

What concerns me is that these are comments that could potentially move the conversation further if left within the context of the blog post. And in that statement I am making the case for what I understand Wave to be -- a platflorm that will allow for in stream communication that will filter back into context. This is amazing to me in and of itself. Today I figured out that it will be relatively easy for us to run our own Wave instance ... this will (presumably) give us a layer of control that could empower a whole new level of openness and conversation in our classrooms.

The old thinking of commenting where I need you to could be destroyed -- and that is an amazingly scary thought. I love it.

The big talk across the edublog space is that it could mean the end of the LMS. I'll just say it, that's crazy talk. What it probably means is that we might get a better footing in the LMS contract world and that we'll have new opportunities to innovate. This platform can do quite a bit for us in the teaching and learning space, but as far as I can tell it probably will not be suited for testing on a real scale and it probably cannot replace the basics of the LMS definition -- learner management. We need the LMS to do lots of things, but we also need new tools to support pedagogy that works to engage students. I think Wave will begin to even the playing field so that we have easy to use teaching and learning platforms alongside our real need to manage assessment, participation, and the like. Wave represents a new opportunity.

I am thinking quite a bit about a post by colleague Michael Feldstein ... I think it and the comments should be part of any of our push to understand these changes. Its worth a read and a discussion. As always I am happy to hear thoughts!

Google Wave

I've worked really hard over the last couple of days to make sense of the Google Wave demo from the weekend. I've actually taken three days to watch the demo and I have to say I am both a bit stunned and impressed. Clearly this is a huge move and one that has big implications for all of us in the .edu space. If it will be ultimately successful as a product I can't say quite yet -- I was not lucky enough to be there and to get a developer account. I'm not even going to attempt to do a review or an overview ... there are plenty of those available online and the demo gives a good a view as you are going to get for the time being.

There are a couple of things I do want to throw out as reactions and see if anyone else is thinking about this stuff -- and I will be wanting to talk about it when we run into each other. The first thing that comes to mind is how obvious this all is -- I mean once I'd seen it. They released the tool that so many people I spend time with are always talking about, typicaly in terms like "wouldn't it be cool if we could just edit this document in real time and just blah, blah, blah." In so many ways, it is a real representation of the many conversations I've had the last several years. Once I started to see how documents could be authored in such a naturally collaborative fashion I was sold. I've honestly not seen something so paradigm bending in a single demo in quite a long time.

Just the portion of the demo where they are collaboritivly editing a Wave that gets instantly published to a blog is mind blowing. When anyone can wander up to that blog post and drop comments or edits and it flows back into the Wave I was beyond astonished. I can now use a blog for a big class and have every single conversation happen in real time either in that blog or in my Wave client (if that is even a real thing). Instead of browsing to sites (even via an RSS reader) I can just stay in Wave and watch all of the conversations happen. Everything I need to do can live there -- I think. If it really does pull together email, Twitter, and Herculean-powered google doc like features then I can only begin to see how this can change how we use technology in the classroom. Sign me up for that as my google for education suite -- you can keep the rest.

And that is one of the other things that just blows my mind ... Google previewed something that could make so much of their other stuff obsolete (even before much of it comes out of beta). Honestly, why would I use separate spaces for email, collaborative document creation, project management, communication, publishing, form building, and conversations of every shape and size when I can simply live in the Wave environment. Until I see it I can't say for sure, but so far I am impressed.

As I was watching the demo I was hanging out with my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald. Scott and I taught a course together that has gotten some press for our use of Twitter ... as we are watching this demo we kept chomping at the bit to give it a go next Spring. What it left me wondering was if this will be viewed as a massively disruptive environment like nearly all the other social platforms are, or if it will be welcomed into our teaching and learning environments? It seems to have so much of what we'd want from a platform that the implications for our work is enormous. I have to say I am very anxious to see how it plays with several of the ideas Scott and I have been tossing around.

The timing is amazing as well ... just as we and so many others are entering into transitional periods with our LMS/CMS environments Wave has come along and shattered our notions of what it means to use the web as a platform to empower real time conversations. I know the traditional systems cannot catch up to something like this in time, it is quite frankly just too damn insane of an environment for them to latch onto. This isn't like bolting a blogging platform to an existing code base, this is about rethinking the way we do things together face to face and online. It is about completely rethinking learning, teaching, authoring, sharing, collaborating, and so much more. I wonder if the rest of you feel as energized by the potential? From where I am sitting, this could be the start of what is next on so many levels.