Collaborative working

Every day, new opportunities for collaborative working appear. The ubiquitous "wiki" demonstrated the potential and the power of online, collaborative working for websites but was somewhat limited in terms of producing other documents.

Nowadays, the likes of Google have entered the fray and provide products that could accelerate online collaboration in two key areas - word processing and spreadsheets. These are the most popular applications used in education and business environments and the move to using effecivie online word processing and spreadsheet applications heralds a bright future. At present, this online products only work with the following web browsers: Camino (1.0a1 or higher), FireFox (1.0.5 or higher) and Mozilla (1.5 or higher).

Google Docs and Spreadsheets is an easy to use system of creating word processed documents and spreadsheets with in-built support for collaboration with other authors. The Google system supports documents and spreadsheets in a variety of formats, so it is very easy to upload and use existing offline files in formats such as .doc or .xls for example. Revisions to documents are logged automatically, making it simple to see the changes, switch to an alternative version ansd save the file in a variety of formats.

What advantages does this offer for e-learning?

In reality and with imagination, there are so many possibilities but here are a just few. For identified groups working collaboratively at different time and in different places:

• brainstorming ideas and creating document outlines;
• creating narratives and storylines;
• producing schedules, action plans, cost profiles,and financial models.

In addition, the opportunities for sequencing online tutorial activities with groups of students are extensive. The online tour provided by Google provides a useful overview.

As the world shrinks further with the internet, it would seem that chances to educationally collaborate grows with online products such as these!