Communication and teamwork are crucial for the success of any projects. Whether in building something for a contest, organizing a sports team, or writing a class paper together, education is filled with ways that group coordination is crucial. And it ought to be that way, as students must learn these skills to be successful in the workplace. What better way to do that than to use real-life professional collaboration tools, right?
Last spring semester, I was assigned team project in my TeleCampus class from the University of Texas. Excited to put technology to the test, I quickly set my team up with a wiki from PBworks. It seemed simple enough to use. But it turned out to not be so easy. Classmates felt overwhelmed and resorted to emails and merging Word documents, and even I had trouble figuring out some of the system. Eventually, our wiki was abandoned, and the class project hobbled along as every other end-of-20th-century class project had.
In the fall semester, I once again had a group class project at my new college, Florida Tech. This time, I had heard of Writeboard. Writeboard is an amazing product from the people at 37signals, and best of, it’s free! It is an incredibly simple online text editor. That’s it. What, you say? Does it have feature x? Probably not. But that was the problem with PBworks. It had every feature and then some, but everyone was confused by it. Do I click here or there, or both? With Writeboard, we simply were able to focus on writing.
Writeboard does support simple text formatting, e.g. asterisk around a word make it bold (*example*). I actually discovered the formatting by accident, because it is just natural to give emphasis to text like that. It also saves every version of our file, so we could easily see what we’d done before or what someone else changed. We all signed in with a simple password; no new accounts for every student to setup. Everyone in my class found it equally easy to use, and we had a vibrant community helping each other with class notes and the group project. Altogether we had over 4,000 words in one Writeboard; not necessarily recommended, but it shows the power of Writeboard! The tech is so easy to use, everyone enjoyed it. And the important thing is that it actually helped us achieve our goals in ways no other tool had ever done. Even though we techies love new features and tools, the truth is that when something needs to be done, just getting it done is sometimes better!
One other tool that helped our team out was my Backpack account. This great tool, which I hope to write about more in the near future, lets you store lists, notes, links (including Writeboards), and more on easy-to-edit pages. For our class, I made a public page where I put a link to our team’s Writeboard, notes with important deadlines and information about the project, and lists of assignments and participants. It just tied everything in the class together easily and quickly. No starting a new website, designing HTML/CSS, or anything, just getting the job done.
I can’t wait to try this out in my next class group project again. If technology can make group projects both fun and productive, that’s really something! So next time you’re in a group project, give Writeboard and Backpack a try; your team might get more done (and a better grade) too!
Matt,
I had to deal with the same wiki in my final class at UNT this past semester. One thing that was challenging was that revisions were difficult to note unless someone chose another color or font that distinguished them from others. One nice part was that it allowed you to see who was really working on the team project. It was not hard to figure out who was doing their part anyway.
So were you using Writeboard or PBwiki? I don’t really remember with PBwiki, but it seems both of them didn’t highlight who did what. Writeboard did list revisions so with the name of the person who had edited a section, though, and you could easily compare 2 revisions to see what they had added/edited. So that was helpful.
Nice to see you here, and let me know if I can change/add/improve anything! I’ll try to have frequent content/updates, so check back!
Matt,
I had to deal with the same wiki in my final class at UNT this past semester. One thing that was challenging was that revisions were difficult to note unless someone chose another color or font that distinguished them from others. One nice part was that it allowed you to see who was really working on the team project. It was not hard to figure out who was doing their part anyway.
So were you using Writeboard or PBwiki? I don’t really remember with PBwiki, but it seems both of them didn’t highlight who did what. Writeboard did list revisions so with the name of the person who had edited a section, though, and you could easily compare 2 revisions to see what they had added/edited. So that was helpful.
Nice to see you here, and let me know if I can change/add/improve anything! I’ll try to have frequent content/updates, so check back!
Hi Matthew, I stopped using Writeboards the moment we were able to use Google Docs. (and now use Google Sites for project documentation).
The problem with Writeboards is that the process is all wrong:
1. View (assuming it’s an existing document
2. Click Edit, to edit a paragraph
3. Wait for the editor to load
4. Scroll down & Squint in order to find the paragraph that you wanted to edit. (let’s say you want to insert a small table, for which you’ll need to know HTML)
5. Click ‘Save as newest version’ and wait again to see latest version.
6. Oops! You forgot a closing somewhere! (or to bold a word, or a numbered list looks wrong)
7. Click Edit again…
And so on. Surprising that 37Signals got it so wrong, considering their focus on making their products customer friendly.
Hi Matthew, I stopped using Writeboards the moment we were able to use Google Docs. (and now use Google Sites for project documentation).
The problem with Writeboards is that the process is all wrong:
1. View (assuming it’s an existing document
2. Click Edit, to edit a paragraph
3. Wait for the editor to load
4. Scroll down & Squint in order to find the paragraph that you wanted to edit. (let’s say you want to insert a small table, for which you’ll need to know HTML)
5. Click ‘Save as newest version’ and wait again to see latest version.
6. Oops! You forgot a closing somewhere! (or to bold a word, or a numbered list looks wrong)
7. Click Edit again…
And so on. Surprising that 37Signals got it so wrong, considering their focus on making their products customer friendly.