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Google Docs as a Multi-modal wiki

Inevitably I want to start autobiographically. When researching for my EMA on H800, I decided to look at wikis in practice. The only Higher Education example I could find was accessed via this reference:

Higginbotham, D., May-Landy, L. & Beeby, D. (2008) ‘Promoting Collaborative Learning Using Wikis’. Webcast. Available: http://ccmmtl.columbia.edu/nme2008/sessions/wikispaces_collaborative.html (Accessed 06/08/2015).

However, on re-investigating I find the video material is now only available through a web-page designed to publicise, trial and sell a bespoke wiki resource (known as Wikispaces).

Columbia (2015) ‘A University-Wide Wiki Solution’ Available from: https://www.wikispaces.com/content/private-label/case-study-columbia (Accessed 09/04/2016).

So what has changed. The original connection was to the conference proceedings following a pilot  only run on selected course by TEL technician, Dan Beeby. At that point, the pilot used open-source software (actually Google Docs) to model its wiki. Now Campus Wikispace is integrated into Columbia’s LMS but is on sale. It can trialled from that webpage (but i hate financial semi-commitments like this so I gave it a miss.

The reasons given for initially using Google Docs was that the latter was, for reasons not clear to my very very low-level appreciation of coding repertoires, that the Moodle facilities were not very adaptable to editing multi-media material, whilst Google docs is.

In the OU on H800 we found out the LMS wiki was intolerant to major editing of tabular graphics and other graphics. Hence group members opted out of  wiki use, except as as a text only or list-based resource. Yet, I never explored Google Doc myself. I now have, starting at: https://www.google.com/docs/about/ .  

In fact I wrote this in Google Doc. I have inserted above a screenprint of the ‘sharing’ facility, which allowed me to enter emails of persons I wanted to be able to edit the document (or have other means of access I could choose), whether or not they were registered with Google or Google Doc. I could edit the screen print - or someone else I allowed so to do - could - cropping, enlarging, choosing wrapping etc. They could not be so edited in this version on the OU Moodle blog.

The same is true of tables and more conventional images. This immediately enlarges the functionality of this document as a wiki - the only drawback being that although the free facilities (including storage on the Google ‘My Drive’ (presumably ‘cloud’ based)) are good, they may with continued use seem very limited.

This seems an OLD technology to recommend as a change but even in H817 it would transform our use of the most accessible tool for fostering participatory and collaborative learning. As I write this, I am reading Greengard (S. [2014] The Internet of Things Mass, Cambs, MIT Press) and overawed by the technologies in that I could be showing off about - delusively in my case). But that would not be where I am act in the game of driving change in my teaching and learning. 

So my recommendation is to H817 administrators - give us Google Doc (or Wikispaces) so that we can really explore the affordances of wikis for networking and group projects based on ‘making’ collaborative objects. We can only learn, for instance better skills with different media with that kind of flexibility.

At the moment, I steer clear of video or animation (fear of the new) and have only a feeling of beginner’s capability with basic text-image multi-modality. But I can learn from those ‘infographic’ experts out there amongst my fellow learners. That's one use of openness. 

Let’s do it. Goodness knows what even simple technological access will do to our respective pedagogies - open them up?.