Classroom Pedagogy: The Reality TV Edition

October 5, 2010, 03:00 PM ET

Online Tools For Collaboration

Over the last year or so I’ve been involved with two different collaborative projects, each of which has required keeping up with an array of people, tasks, documents, and deadlines. Furthermore, each of these projects involve people I don’t see every day or even every week. As a result, it can be tricky to keep track of who’s doing what by when. Email certainly isn’t the answer. Nor are weekly or bi-weekly meetings in which everyone reminds everyone else what they’re working on. Instead, we’ve come to rely on a combination of online applications focused on the aforementioned tasks, documents, and deadlines. Assuming that communication by phone or email is already worked out, here are a few things one can do to manage collaboration.

An online calendar

Google Calendar is a very user-friendly tool. At the beginning of the semester, map out what you’d like to get done and by when; put those deadlines into the calendar. If you plan on meeting face to face periodically (or talking on the phone) take a look at everyone’s weekly schedule and plot out your regular meetings or conversations; put those dates and times into the calendar.

Finally, share that calendar with all of your collaborators. If the group decides that a meeting or a deadline needs to be changed, make sure you change it on the calendar. If you work all of this out at the beginning of the semester, you don’t need to waste time in every meeting trying to figure out when you’re going to meet next.

I know this may seem like one of those "Well, duh!" suggestions, but if you've already mapped out the entire semester in advance, you'll be more likely to make your meetings and hit your deadlines. This semester, for example, one set of my collaborators set up our schedule of meetings before the semester even officially started. The following week, as other committees and projects started working to find times for meetings or events, I was able to keep those collaboration meeting times in place and arrange other times for other responsibilities.

An online document editor

Whatever you do, don’t just keep emailing documents back and forth to each other. As Jason has written before, this path leads to sorrow for a variety of reasons. Put all of your documents into something like GoogleDocs and share them with all of your collaborators. This way, documents don’t get lost, and version control is much less of a problem.

Last week I sat at the same table with two other people, putting the finishing touches on a short article we co-authored. We each had our laptops in front of us and the document open in GoogleDocs. It was surprisingly easy to suggest (and make) the necessary changes on the article before we sent it off, certainly much faster and easier than if we had each edited the documents individually and then tried to incorporate all of our edits into one document.

An online task manager

If everyone in your group has an account with Remember The Milk, you can share individual tasks with others. Or you could install a simple todo list script like myTinyToDo on your own server. Alternately, you could create a spreadsheet in GoogleDocs with each row representing a different task and each column representing some element of information about that task:

What’s the deadline?
Who’s responsible for completing it?
What's the status of the task?
Are there any notes associated with the task?

There are many different ways to set up such a to task management system in GoogleDocs: you'll find some of them here in the "Calendars & Scheduling" section of the GoogleDocs templates gallery. And here's a (silent) YouTube video demonstrating one such method.

What about you?

These have been just three online tools for collaboration that I've made use of over the last few months. I know that there are many more possibilities. What have you found to be effective online (or otherwise!) tools for collaboration?

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Christopher Schmidt]

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Comments

1. heatherwhitney - October 05, 2010 at 05:07 pm

Google Wave was a great tool for online collaborations. I'm sorry to see that it is not going to be continued to be supported.

2. drnels - October 05, 2010 at 07:23 pm

More people in my circles are starting to use wikis from PBWorks for collaboration, especially teaching related. It's a good way to share documents and links privately, and we can also talk about the good and bad of what's happening in class. If something fails, we can get support without being so public, but it's also all in one place.

3. beveridge - October 06, 2010 at 07:07 am

Google Calendar is good, but if you can afford it, I would suggest either GoToMeeting or Adobe Connect Pro. Both offer the ability of all people seeing a document on a screen and through conferencing one can do editing. Version control is a serious problem in all of these situations, and I find that it almost impossible to make sure it works, if one does not have a system where only one person has control of the document at a time, and changes are tracked.

4. ksledge - October 06, 2010 at 07:11 am

what about managing references with an online editor such as googledocs? Is that even possible? (I'm talking about EndNote, for example.)

5. 11164868 - October 06, 2010 at 07:31 am

Google docs is nice for some things, but in technical areas its support using figures, equations and complex tables just does not cut it.

6. cardinalham - October 06, 2010 at 08:09 am

I just submitted a grant with some colleagues. Ten days before the submission deadline, the PI's laptop died, taking all his work-in-progress to the grave with it. But our grant proposal was alive and well in the cloud in Google Docs!

Yes, we did download it and finish the final formatting in a commercial word processor, but for the writing phrase it was incredibly valuable to have it all available to everyone all the time.

7. mschedlb - October 06, 2010 at 08:46 am

For a FREE collaboration tool that's as capable as GotoMeeting or Webex, look at DimDim, Yugma, and WizIQ.

I use the FREE Zoho suite with its collaboration facilities, including shared calendar, shared documents (compatible with Office, Google Docs, and OpenOffice), online meeting, shared task list, shared planner, wiki, and project tracker.

Zoho also has a LaTeX equation editor built-in...

8. oliver_l - October 06, 2010 at 10:43 am

OpenStudy has been very useful for many classes. It has real time collaboration and the ability to connect students with a wider audience outside the classroom Definitely worth a look. The Chronicle did an article on them a few weeks ago: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Start-Up-Aspires-to-Make-the/26780/

9. dabilock - October 06, 2010 at 10:44 am

For your students there are new collaboration features of NoodleTools where they can share source lists, notes, outline and Google Docs paper --- all of which the instructor can comment on within the software.

10. maburns - October 06, 2010 at 01:15 pm

Me and my professional organization find Google Groups to be incredibly useful for collaborative committee and task force work. GG generates a discussion listserv for group communication, there are web pages where everyone can add information and work on documents together (though it would have been nice to have more of the tools available in Google docs here), and a place to upload any files we might want to share. Alas, it looks like Google is going to stop supporting GG early in the new year and we will have to find another place to work together. Does anyone know of any other place in the cloud where all these functions come together? We need to find a comparable substitute.

11. fcmarin - October 07, 2010 at 11:01 am

A graduate English class at NMSU created a site with information on several web tools that could be used for collaboration, the site is fairly new, and may be moved in the future, it can currently be found at this address: http://web.nmsu.edu/~jalmjeld/579/
The class was taught by assistant professor, Jen Almjeld