"At first I wondered why Google needed to demonstrate its popular e-mail service. Didn’t students already know how to click send? But when I hopped on the bus at George Washington University last month, I saw that the demos highlighted all the other Web services in its Google Apps for Education e-mail package for colleges, which includes a Web-based word processor called Google Docs, a Web-based spreadsheet program, and other tools.
Those tools are the cloud computing part—the term usually refers to programs that run over the Internet rather than locally on a user’s computer. And Google officials explained that many students don’t yet know about those new Web-based services."
and then an anecdote
At a summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that I sat in on last year, I asked students whether they had stayed up all night at the library finishing their final group projects, as the program’s organizers had predicted. One of the students looked at me as if I were crazy. Yes, he had worked late—until about 3 a.m.—but he had been at home by himself. The students all contributed to a shared document using Google Docs, which anyone in the group could edit online from anywhere. All of the students were essentially logged in to the same computer (in this case off at Google somewhere), one adding a paragraph at the end, another changing the font, and another rewriting the title. There was no longer any need to worry about getting everyone in the same room at the same time.
It is interesting that Google spends time promoting this service, letting students see the advantage of this type of virtual collaboration. Will this be something that all students will suddenly grasp--will there be a tipping point beyond which it will be a strategy too obvious to need explaining--or will students need to learn new strategies of collaboration and communication? And, is Google not just teaching students about this, but also gathering information on how informal groups like this collaborate?
