Blogg-Ed Indetermination

In a previous post, I laid out ten ideas for making Google docs better. Here are ten more. Feel free to contribute to the list!

1. Invitations to meetings in the calendar view are too subtle. I mean really, do you expect me to see that tiny question mark?
2. I like that you add email addresses automatically for me. That’s cool. What would be even cooler, would be to scan the message for additional address-like data (like that in most signature files), open a window in my contacts, and add that data too, allowing me to edit as needed.
3. When you add a new document folder in Google Docs, the list should automatically refresh to reflect the new alphabetical order.
4. There’s no way for end users to see who is in an enterprise-wide email group, so what we do is to maintain a separate Google doc which, of course, needs to be updated every time we make a group address change. We shouldn’t have to do that. Let the administrator determine who has rights to view the members of an email group.
5. In Google Sites, you should offer a report to the site owner about dead links, and automatically fix links to other Google sites within the enterprise if and when they change.
6. While you’re at it in Google Sites, allow the webmaster or users to tag individual pages, to then crate tag clouds.
7. All, and I mean all, of your K-12 Google docs customers would benefit from a better calendar. Start with allowing the administrator to setup a daily schedule for the school that can be toggled on-and-off by users so they can easily schedule events by time of day or by period of day.
8. Any color (labels, calendars, and so on) would benefit by being able to control their transparency. Solid color are not only passé, they hinder multiple calendars within the same view.
9. Google To Do lists are lame. See Remember the Milk for some ideas about getting it better.
10. Appreciate the fact that we can upload PDF documents into Google Docs. Now, make them editable!

What’s on your mind about Google docs?

Among the topics sure to crop up in the listservs I frequent (BAISNET and ISED-L), as well as various Nings, blogs, and wikis is that of calendars. A composite inquiry of all the things people are looking for in a school calendaring system might look something like this:

I suspect we have talked about this before, but we’re looking for a new calendaring program that:

1. will easily schedule resources, meetings, and parent conferences
2. will automatically find open meeting times & reserve needed resources
3. is cross-platform, and web based
4. will automatically adjust to schedule changes as they are made
5. will send meeting changes and to-do list reminders via email, SMS, or Twitter
6. will allow for meeting agenda and other documents to be attached to in the invitation
7. is very user friendly
8. is available 24 x 7 x 365
9. supports a variety devices both online and off-line, with automatic synchronization
10. has flexible, easy to use security, with various levels of permissions to allow access to certain events by role
11. is compatible with ical and other web calendaring standards
12. prints a range of attractive, easy-to-read formats
13. allows for secure access by administrative assistants
    
14. allows for easy analysis of meeting and task loads and responsibilities by individuals and groups, and FINALLY
    
15. is free, with high quality technical support and, low maintenance, and requested features added in a timely manner.

Aah. The holy grail of calendars. A fortune awaits the company that can create one, though point #15 suggests it will be a very, very small fortune.

Over my career, I have tried a range of calendaring solutions in search of the perfect system, including Meeting Maker, Outlook, FirstClass, CalendarMaker, Web Event, Google Calendar, and iCal. In some ways these are all great programs. But in some fundamental way, each of them also sucked.

The companies that make calendaring software focus their products on individuals and businesses. Schools are a secondary market, and they don’t understand us.

To start with, schools operate in two different time spheres: (a) the time observed by the rest of the world and (b) school time. School time is normally meant to be class periods. Such as a period 1, period 2, period 3, or period A, 1A, nap time, math time, reading time, block 1, block 2, and so on. No one outside of the school has any idea how these times correlate to real world time, and even those inside of schools often have to rely on cheat sheets to make the translation. Think of these different time spheres as our equivalent of the metric versus the English measurement system.

So right out of the starting gate calendaring programs made for the real (metric) world are incompatible with time as observed in the school world.

But wait, computers are smart. Can’t they bridge the gap? A computer can instantly convert metric to English units and back in measurement, why can’t a computer convert between different time spheres?

Computers could do this of course. But there’s this niggling little problem of no two schools using exactly the same class schedule. Plus schedules change, often by the day of the week—and let’s not forget special schedules that are used for planned events such as assemblies and sports, or unplanned events such as school closings or late starts do to weather.

So now the problem has become much more complex, because you must allow the end user to be able to enter the information peculiar to their school’s schedule, with the ability for it to be instantly updated, with these updates recalculating real-world time, checking for conflicts with people’s schedules and resources, and then synchronizing across devices.

It’s enough to make even a Google engineer weep.

Schools are not likely to change to real-world time anytime soon (pun intended). This leaves us at the mercy of benevolent calendar makers who will listen to our plea and come to our aid. If I had to bet on who that might be, I would lay my money on Google (who has a burgeoning number of K-12 schools using their Google Apps for Education) or Rjenda (a new company that has taken assessment calendaring to a new high).

I’m curious to know what readers may think not only of the list of 15 requirement for school calendars that I listed above, but also what solutions you have found that work best for you.

We’ve been using Gmail and Google Apps for several months now in my school, and I must say that I am very pleased with the results so far. We moved from the FirstClass collaborative email suite, a fine but (for us) limited set of tools. We are finding that Gmail, with its ease of connecting to handheld devices, integration with other services, intuitive interface, and constantly evolving tools (I’m a big fan of their labs add-ons), has been a wonderful replacement for FirstClass’ email system. The other Google education products, docs, sites, calendaring, contacts—even Google’s version of tiny-urls—are proving to be a great addition to our school.

But this is not to suggest that there’s no place for Google to improve. After all, most of their products are perpetually beta releases.

Here, in no order other than how they came to me, are ten ideas for making Google Apps and Mail better for education:

1. Most of the time when I am adding contacts, I am adding their work contact information, not home information. I’d like Google enterprise users to be able to default the field to work rather than home.

Don't assume I'm a home user, please!

2. The Google Enterprise help form sucks. Like most organizations, especially those that offer a free service, try to get users to exhaust self-help options before contacting the company. I get that, and I am okay with it. But when I do get to a point where I need to create a trouble ticket with Google, their selection of what problems I am reporting is terribly limited. Those of you who have to do thi know what I mean.

3. Google Apps Status should be offer more granulated information and proactive notification. For example, there have been time when we’re having issue and the status shows green across the board, as this is true for Google overall. But if there are local issue to my site it would be nice if Google could automatically recognize that and report it. Better yet, they should send me a SMS.

4. Google Apps for Education should include Blogger and Picassa. If Google wants schools to use Blogger instead of Wordpress (or Edublogs, sorry guys), then promote it and integrate it with Google Apps, especially Google sites. Ditto for Picassa. Want to beat Flickr, offer schools unlimited storage, great privacy controls, and robust organization skills so that photos can be organized and shared online.

5. Google Widgets. I like adding useful Google Gadgets to sites. It’s a great way to add dynamic content to a site. Yet I have a couple of beefs with how this is currently implemented in Sites. (a) then you type in a search term for the gadget you are looking for, example RSS, you it takes a loooong time for all of the results to load. And then there is little to differentiate between a RSS utility, which allows you to insert your won RSS feeds into a site, or someone who has created their own RSS feed of Hannah Montana news. (shiver). And then, to top things off, the results may include several widgets with exactly the same name and description, with no version number or other information to tell you the differences between them. Lame.

6. Better imap migration support for FirstClass. Okay, so maybe this one is not really in Google’s court. My hunch is that it is a FirstClass problem, but nonetheless, we had a devil of a time migrating email from FirstClass to Google using imap, which is preferred over POP3 since it can migrate mail folders as well as inbox contents. But shame on you, Google, for not having better error messages when the process would fail because an email attachment in FirstClass was greater than 10MB.

7. Integrate of Google Video and YouTube. It’s nice that we get nearly a terrabyte of free storage for Google videos along with our Google Education edition. Google video is proving to be an important adjunct to our coursework, and it’s an easy way to keep content private. But our school also maintains a YouTube channel, and some of the content should be able to live in both places with a simple click of the mouse.

8. Implement change of owner in Google Docs speadsheets. Yeah, yeah, you’re working on it.

9. Controlled vocabulary for Google Sites. Every couple of weeks I go in to the admin interface for Google sites and I am pleased to see so many new sites available. Faculty, staff, and students are creating them right and left. But this organic growth has its limits, especially when it comes to tagging the groups so that others may find them. Let me suggest a couple of things that might help: (a) Le the administrator set up a list of tags, at least one of which must be applied to the site, such as “clubs,” “faculty,” “employees,” or “students;” (b) allow a tag cloud to be created in a master directory of  sites.

10. Smarter management of duplicates in Contacts. Google, the premier search engine, seems clueless when it comes to contact. Oh sure, it can find them, but it’s up to you to suggest which ones are duplicates to be merged. I’d really like Google to perform an audit of my contacts from time to time to identify potential duplicates. And while they’re at it, why not validate the email addresses and URLs I’ve entered, and cross check to see if any of my users have Google Voice numbers?

Hey Google,  keep up the good work. (But make it a wee bit better….)

Oh, and here’s a bonus suggestion. Make my Google Education account work just like my personal account. There’s still some things I can’t log into using my Google ed account. Instead, I’m forced to use my personal account, for things like support forums, Google Voice, and so on. Tks….

Eight years ago, academic Marc Prensky provided us with two useful terms to differentiate between a younger generation of technology users who have grown up surrounded by the Internet and computers, from older users who had not, labeling them “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” respectively. In a recent article in Innovate, “H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Native to Digital Wisdom,” [free registration required] Prensky writes: “Although many have found the terms useful…the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants [has] become less relevant. Clearly, as we work to create and improve the future, we need to imagine a new set of distinctions. I suggest we think in terms of digital wisdom.”

I agree. Chronologically a digital immigrant but spiritually a digital native, I have struggled with this distinction as I have watched clueless young people struggle with technology, accept information uncritically, and behave horribly online, while older people, sometimes even “senior citizens,” are as facile, excited, and connected as the best of the “natives.” As Prensky states, “Technology alone will not replace intuition, good judgment, problem-solving abilities, and a clear moral compass,” qualities which one often associates with experience gained over time. Prensky predicts the emergence of “digital wisdom,” a marriage of sorts, of “wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities.” [emphasis his]

Prensky references Nicholas Carr’s provocative article, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Prensky’s response is not surprising. “In fact, what’s happening now is very much the opposite: Digital technology is making us smarter.” So while we may not be as good at memorizing as students in Socrates day, telling time by the position of the sun in the sky, or we may struggle when reading a map or passing spelling tests, these “losses” pale in comparison to the gains to be had with a digitally enhanced mind and its access to a greater expanse of  collective memories and collaboration.

At this point in his article, I am really getting excited about the three questions he poses next:

• What constitutes digital wisdom?
• What habits do the digitally wise use to advance their capabilities and the capabilities of those around them?
• Can digital wisdom be taught?

But here is where the article begins to falter. Some examples of digital wisdom are provided in the form of the Obama campaign’s use of Web 2.0 technologies, and the use of blogs and wikis by journalists. And Prensky is quick to point out that there’s a difference between digital wisdom and what he dubs “digital cleverness.” But the exposition ends here. We’re left with an enticing idea that needs discussion and augmentation to make it as clear and useful as his earlier work.

Perhaps this is not so surprising. It is (to my knowledge), Prensky’s first article on digital wisdom, and no doubt deeper thinking is on the horizon. And as someone possessing digital wisdom, I expect we’ll here more from Prensky and that he, too, will hear more from the members of the digital community to augment this tantalizing proposition.

To that end, let me offer the following suggestions as food for thought.

A person is digitally wise when she or he:

• uses technology to contribute to the “marketplace of ideas” for the purpose of authentic assessment and to further our collective knowledge.
• uses technology to find arguments and counterarguments to propositions, uncover biases, and examine ideas from multiple perspectives.
• recognizes that technology can and should be used to augment human connections, that true wisdom lies in the exchange of ideas with others and not in the solitary confines of person and machine.
• uses technology for artistic expression to amplify and deepen the human understanding and representation of truth.
• trusts their instincts as well as the data; makes intuitive leaps beyond the data.

This is fun. Let the comments begin!

Please respond to the following:

A person is digitally wise when she or he…

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