Currently, I am in a group of four for another communication class. For the most recent project, we all would meet in Uris Library and work in the group collaboration room. This room was different from most computer labs because each person could work with a double-screen computer, instead of a single screen. So three people got a double-screen computer, and the last group member brought their laptop.
One thing I thought that went really well was the display angle/0rientation. Three people had a double-screen, meaning not only could they have the google document that we were all editing open, but they could also have readings from Moodle open on the other screen. It was very easy typing into the google document when the reading was right there on the other screen. Granted, for the person with the laptop, they probably had to maximize and minimize windows very frequently, but overall, switching back and forth between the document and readings was realtively easy.
Another issue that we faced was simultaneous user actions. Although we weren't at a single computer, like the issue raised by Scott, Grant and Mandryk, we WERE all trying to edit the same document on google at the same time. Whenever someone makes a change to the google document it is a. hard to find where the edit was made and b. the page reloads and puts you at the beginning of the document.
One thing that could improve the collaboration with a google document, is to have highlighted font for newly input information for a certain amount of time, this way all the users editing the document will know what has been changed. If anything has been taken out of the document, the google document could highlight this font in red and the users will know this information has been erased. I don't know how google could changed the page reloading after edits have been made because I'm not that computer savy, but if there was anyway the users could just keep working in the same place, that would be very helpful. Whenever the group would ask questions about particular parts, much like the issue Greenberg raised, we would sometimes lose track of where the person was talking about. If there was some way the user could scroll their mouse over a particular part of text, and have this visible to the other group members, that would also be very beneficial.
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I couldn't agree more with your critique of google documents and its lackluster performance when multiple users are editing a file concurrently. A real-time highlighting feature would do wonders to establish who is focusing on/doing what and keep the confusion to a minimum. This would definitely help to level the playing field in a group configuration with multiple remote users.
ReplyDeleteThe CL3 lab is one of the best labs on campus for that very reasons that you explained. But on a more serious note, Google Docs always seems to have that same recurring flaw. When multiple people try to work on the same document at the same time it often can be counter productive since people usually tend to delete the work other people have done fairly recently, and if the runtime isn't close to real time it becomes that much more of an issue. The idea that Tom has would definitely be a good way to alleviate some parts of the problem, and it could make google docs less counter productive.
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