I just finished a group assignment using Google Docs for an educational technology class. The assignment included dividing two books and reviewing assigned sections using Google Docs as our collaboration tool. I’ve set up documents on Google before, but I haven’t used it for collaboration. After this experience, I’m not sure that I will use it again for collaboration.
Our start wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be. A couple of people in our group had a problem accessing the document because they didn’t have Google accounts. If you don’t have a Google account, you have to create one to access and edit Google Docs that you want to grant limited access. I would prefer, that as the document creator, I be allowed to provide a password to anyone I’m giving permission to access the document.
If I had to choose between Google Docs and PBworks wiki for collaboration, my preference would be for PBworks wiki because of the ease of access.
This assignment also required that we post a review of one of the books we read – “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms’’ by Will Richardson or “Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology’’ by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson to Amazon.com
I chose to post a review of “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms’’ by Will Richardson.
I guess I would say that this process hasn't changed how I would use Amazon for reviews. I use Amazon's rating system for making book decisions on a case-by-case basis. And even at that, I tend to look for another source. Although I've found that with the growing transparency on the Internet, reviews of products by average users have become much more reliable.
You can also take look at the group work here.
I really like Google Docs for my own personal use, but I'm not a big fan of using it for collaboration. I think the editing process is just one-at-a-time by nature, and while it's nice to allow multiple people to contribute to a single document, it's not really the same as brainstorming and wordsmithing collaboratively. That said, I'll admit to being someone who doesn't really want to collaborate with others to write or edit. We each have such individual writing styles, my natural tendency is to just "correct" things to sound the way I would say them - right or wrong!
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