You've Been Quiet

Yes, I've been quiet. Not much happens when you are unemployed. =-)

But I haven't been idle. I am supposed to be turning my thesis into articles and a book but instead I have detoured to a personal project on Japanese popular culture. I'm dropping by today to say how much I adore Google documents (Google Docs).

I have the, perhaps faulty, impression that many historians and history professors (all professors?) are slow to adopt new technologies. (None of those working at Westminster, of course!) So this post serves as a "Wow! Check this out!...Shiny new toy this way..." post OR, if Google Docs is on your radar, this post can serve as a review... A Four-Star review at that.

My personal project is actually a collaborative endeavor with a fellow scholar living in California. While she is very good at emailing back and forth in order to track our thoughts, online chats, and written pieces, I ... suck at it, to be blunt. I needed something that would track changes separate from my email inbox. After poking around online, we decided to use Google Docs.

After uploading a document, you can choose to share it with other Google users. The program lists last modification and can even show details of what was changed by which user. More useful for me and my collaborator, we can write in the document at the same time (so long as it is shared and we have permission to edit)! She can change my word choices and I can correct her typoes. Additionally, we can "chat" in a text document, saving our conversations, ideas, and brainstorming sessions.

I imagine this would be an interesting way to allow students to collaborate and do group work, beyond the blackboard-type platforms, in addition to allowing scholars to collaborate online without losing documents in their email inboxes.

Not a five-star review? Nah. Google Docs is limited in some ways. It likes to convert files to certain platforms and cannot convert all file types. But that's a minor complaint and my collaborator and I are able to work around it because we both have the same software programs.