About two months ago, Google added something new to Google Documents: Discussions. It’s a very convenient way to keep track of comments on a document---even after the comments have been deleted because the discussion about the passage in question has been resolved.
You can find a good overview of how it works here. At first glance, discussions don’t look very different from the previously familiar comment thread:
There’s also, of course, a way to mark discussions as resolved:
After the discussion is resolved, it disappears from the document’s margins, so that you only see the discussions that indicate work yet to be done. However, the discussion remains available, should it be necessary to return to it at a later date. Clicking the “Discussions” button in the upper right brings up all discussions related to the document for easy perusal:
Discussions also has a notifications feature, so that you can be alerted via email when someone comments on a document or replies to a comment that you’ve made:
Notifications can be a great timesaver, since they make it unnecessary to go to the document to see if it’s been commented on. Depending on how they’re set up, discussion notifications can also provide an additional record of all discussions about the document.
I can see this making Google Documents even more useful than it already is for collaborative writing and for writing-intensive courses that require revision. I’m not currently involved in a collaborative writing project, but I’m definitely looking forward to using this new feature with my students next fall.
What about you? Have you made use of this new feature yet? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.
A special thanks to all those members of Team ProfHacker who helped me road test this new feature. Alas, I couldn’t capture all of them in the screenshots.
[Image by Flickr user cobra libre / Creative Commons licensed. All other images by the author and Creative Commons licensed.]