Collaborative Software

So I am pretty hyped at the moment, much to the annoyance of my colleagues. After recommending the USB solutions to my students (and so far a lot of them are starting to use it already) I have been focusing on collaborative software this week.

Most of the course I am involved with have project/group elements and in the past we have utilised the likes of  “Yahoo Groups” when they need to manage their own files, coding and documentation. Wiki’s seem like a useful area to explore too, but I have been toying around with MS Groove (only a little) but mainly with a piece of software called “Gobby”.

In essence Groove allows you to place a document on in a virtual space, and any of the invited members can edit the documents at any time from anywhere (given a net connection and the groove software), certainly it helps with having many “revision” documents floating around, or the need for a document manager. so this is certainly something that my degree students could use when needing to produce documents in groups away from classroom activities. A free alternative to this is google docs (includes demo) at http://docs.google.com

Something that I have found on the web that is free and offers a range of functionality is Collaber at http://www.collaber.com/, this might me something to look into in the future.

However, what I’m really physched about is “Gobby”.  Not only is it a free download it has many applications. So what is it then? well basically it is a simple text editor where everyone can access each other documents and create/edit text on-the-fly in a networked environment. Each users text is indicated by a chosen colour background, so you can see who has typed and if editing has occurred who has carried it out. There is also a chat section that is seperate from the main document section. Website: http://gobby.0×539.de/trac/

Now how might this be useful? well lets look at a simple scenario, a Lecturer is delivering a PowerPoint presentation of 20 slides to 10 students. Each student will make their own notes of varying depth (and understanding). These 10 (if they all take notes!) sets of notes are not often (if at all) reviewed.

So now we try out “Gobby”. The Lecturer creates a “session” giving his/her 10 Students the logon details (host/password), each Student starts the “Gobby” application and gives their name (or  nickname) and picks a colour to use. So we are ready to go!

With the same presentation of 20 slides, each student picks 2 slides to author notes on, and two slides to become an editor.  At the end of the slide show we have a comprehensive set of notes that have been collaborated upon, they are peer reviewed and upon summation of the session the Lecturer can review the document themselves (hopefully on the interactive board), correcting any miscomprehension’s. The document is saved for all to use.

But the application reaches further than this, although it has no Bold, Italic or Underline facilities, it does lend itself (and its main use) to collaborative programming – easily being used for web page design, visual basic, etc.

The software is intended to be piloted in April with my Degree students, observations and result to be posted soon after!

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