Monday 18 January 2010

Riding on the Crest of the Wave



I am a recent newbie convert to GoogleWave! I very politely declined an invitation a few months ago because I felt I was already happy enough with Web 2.0 means of contact such as email, Twitter and so on. I really didn't know how on earth I would be able to cope with yet another tool. Anyway, I had a change of heart a few weeks ago, and I now accept that GoogleWave looks like an incredibly useful and versatile tool. I have been using it as an excellent collaboration resource with fellow course participants on my Moodle for Gardening and Cooking course. I am learning by doing. I am trying to find my way around the "blips". " A blip is the smallest unit of conversation. Think of a blip as a single email or a single instant message".

Have a look at the links below which feature excellent tips and information about Google Wave.

The Idiot's Guide to GoogleWave (found via my Twitterstream)
The Complete Guide to GoogleWave (via Radney :)
"Google Wave - Feature by Feature" (via Jane Hart)

The Art of Asking a Good Question?
Have you tried out Google Wave yet? What are your thoughts? Is it going to be the biggest Web 2.0 hit of 2010? I would love to learn more. Please post a comment and share your ideas :)

Image below found on"gtaforums" from Yahoo Images: Crest of a Wave

7 comments:

popps said...

Hmmmm.

fantasticna said...

I would gladly comment if I had an invitation.

:)

popps said...

Second thought (1st was hmmmmm) - this looks a lot like Google Documents?

Mike Harrison said...

From the video above and the video I found when I googled Google Docs they look similar in what they allow you to do. Seems to me Google Wave is more supposed to be about the communication as well as the collaboration on not just docs, but also projects. Not got an invite so couldn't say much, but it looks very useful. Is it the end of email? Don't know - how's it going so far Janet?

Janet Bianchini said...

Hi all

I'm not so "au fait" with Google Docs to be able to comment on the similarities between the two, but what I can say is that like Google Docs, Google Wave is great for real time collaboration. You can see the different blips (messages)as they are being written and you can add/improve/edit each other's work. I use it to collaborate and discuss projects. You can add hyperlinks/images etc as you write and then are some other nice features which I need to investigate.
You can have different waves going on at the same time whereas in Google Docs you only work on one document at a time.

I still like email on a one to one basis, but recently being able to communicate with 3 different people on G-Wave at the same time, is definitely great fun and used together with Skype, makes for a very powerful interactive tool.

I am still a newbie user and it will take time to fully embrace this new technology!

KALINAGO ENGLISH said...

I'm so afraid of having to learn and master another potentially addictive website that I can't even bring myself to watch the video!!!

Shame on me: but 2009 was spent in Nings, Wikis, Twitter.. all thing which am constantly keeping up w/ - let alone blogging, webinars and FB too!!!

:-)

Janet Bianchini said...

Hi Karenne

I know exactly what you mean about yet another tool to add to quite a long list of other great websites.

I have to confess that I haven't looked at "Tweetdeck" yet specifically because I know it would probably be fascinating and I would want to spend time on it and then like you say, there are all the other sites like Twitter, Nings,etc that I visit quite often. How would I be able to fit it all in?

You are doing a grand job of keeping up with everything you are doing Karenne. I don't know where you find the time for it all:)