Waving

Notes on Google Wave session.

New possibilites with Wave. Had used Sakai last semester for her course. First response from students - learning curve here, Wave is clunky. Wave is not even beta, it's preview. Lot of clunkiness because of this but seeing continuous improvements. Think of it like an e-mail inbox as a way to approach wave - each e-mail can be more. Interface is a skeleton. Complaint is no one is using so there is no one to collaborate with. Using this with FYS and required students to sign up and post daily. Under 20 students in class. Students producing a lot of content. Interface is click and drag - drag wave to folder. Started a wave for entire course. Can be confusing with all the waves. Can minimize waves to focus on one. Unlike e-mail, can link waves. By default everything is editable but there are safeguards. No bad experience here. All edits are tracked. You can't someone off a wave, only robots that you have added. Can't even take yourself off a wave. Can filter waves so that they don't show up at the top of your "inbox". Can change access on wave. Two options - read only, full access. Course is "math in the news". Asked students to evaluate plan crash data. Discussion about where to find data, what they should be looking at. Discussion was taking outside of class. Discussion is real-time. You can see simultaneous posts/discussion. If someone is posting to the wave, you can see it as it is typed. Can post files to wave which can be downloaded, editing, and re-uploaded. Might be a good way to organize documents and keep them in a common thread. Can embed any web page inside of a wave. There is a tool you can embed with. Gadgets and robots are available. Wave is really a skeleton and you add extensions. Examples of extensions - translators, url shortener, sharewave (see sharepoint team site in google wave). How to use this in a traditional math class - online office hours with the Watexy robot so that she can insert more complicated math symbols. Watexy uses the same symbols/methods as TeX. Wave-alpha is also a useful tool for math. Wolframalpha tool gives answers to questions posted. Napkin Gadget - back of the napkin kind of tool, you can draw in whatever you want to say. Didn't like the whiteboard tool available. There is a polling gadget. She used this to let students pick topics this semester. She created a wave for students to discuss a topic they couldn't cover in class - health care. She only monitors it to make sure the discussion was civil - that was not a problem. Still looking for ways to use it. Question - how did you define a way. It's just a threaded discussion that is editable. There is a gadget for getting RSS feeds in but you can't RSS out. Wave Archive tool is the only thing that can take out wave content. Some users say interface is unGoogle like in complexity. Another person says have to check it and that is a downside. Has to be part of your daily life to get adoption. Works better in Google Chrome.