The Wave panel
Finally, the Wave panel is where you can see the contents of the wave that you have selected in the Search panel. (See Figure 5) In this screen shot, you can see part of a rather long public wave on the subject of DevLearn 2009. In the center, you can see how participants in the wave are using the wiki-like editing to coordinate their arrival and departure transportation for DevLearn – a high-tech RideShare.
You might notice that at the bottom of the wave, there are several tags that participants have added. Tags aid in searching. If a participant wants to find other waves that are tagged with “devlearn,” it may be more efficient to use that tag than to use Search.
Some miscellaneous notes about Wave-ing
There are several ways to start a wave. You can use the “New Wave” button at the top of the Search panel. If you have no waves showing in the wave panel, you will see a link “Start New Wave” in the middle of the panel. You can also start a chat (or an IM session if you prefer to think of it that way) with someone in your Contacts or in an on-going wave by “pinging” them, and this will create a private wave. Some people are referring to these waves started as private replies within Public or shared waves as "Wavelets.” I think Google developers may be using this term but meaning something different by it, probably something like breakout rooms.
When you start a wave, you have the option to make it Public (waves are private by default). Eventually Google will add the capability to make a wave read-only, and will add moderator powers for the wave originator. (Currently waves are pretty much wide-open.)
Participants can also insert files, images, and gadgets in a wave. Figure 6 shows Votely, which is a gadget that allows participants to vote on a question. In this case, Chad has asked the question, and Delhi Online has inserted a reply comment instead of voting. By the way, that box that surrounds Delhi’s reply defines a “blip.”
Experts and help
At this point, about the best I can say about the help Google provides is that it is pretty basic, and not easy to use. There is a Help area (http://www.google.com/support/wave/) with a small number of very short help topics, and a Help forum. I have had better luck within Wave itself. There are quite a few waves that are very useful, run by users rather than by Google. Here are the ones that have become my favorites (you can find these by using Search from within Wave):
- The Comprehensive Usage Guide to Google Wave
- New and Previewed Wave Features – What Are You Seeing – ContentWave ( TM )
- Useful Public Waves
- Search Cheat Sheet
- Google Wave Extensions (Copy)
About Searching
Make good use of the Search Cheat Sheet listed above. The search syntax in Wave is a bit arcane, or at least it seems so to me. Here are the terms I have been using most often, with a short explanation of each in parentheses:
- with:public [keyword] (Finds public waves with that keyword in them, for example with:public Mobile Learning finds public waves that have Mobile Learning in the name or in the wave. Note that this also brings back waves that contain “Mobile, Alabama” – the Cheat Sheet explains the search operators that Wave uses, which are as arcane as the rest of the syntax.)
- in:inbox (shows all the waves you are listening to)
- by:me (all the waves I have contributed to)
- by:[WAVid] (all the waves this person has contributed to)
WaveBoard and what to expect from developers
Wave runs best using Google Chrome, and almost as well with Firefox and Safari if you have installed Google Gears. Actually, to be perfectly clear, you must install Google Gears if you are using Firefox or Safari (Chrome has Gears built in). [Late note: ArsTechnica (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/10/google-chrome-for-mac-developer-preview-now-official.ars) announced on October 22 that the Chrome browser for Mac was released by Apple in a publicly-available “pre-beta” build that seems stable enough for daily use.] There are still issues with Wave, however – Wave suffers from “lag” (delay between the time you press a key while typing, for example, and when the letter appears). This is especially true in waves with many participants. The Lifehacker wave taught me this. It is extremely overloaded (hundreds of people) and made it clear that at present it’s not a good idea to use Wave with a large group! At least not until there are some moderation tools.
Partly in response to this, developers are creating clients for Wave. Essentially these are lightweight browsers. In the case of Macs (and soon the iPhone), there is now a client called WaveBoard (http://www.getwaveboard.com) that greatly improves the Wave experience. WaveBoard is still in beta, but version 0.6 (which I was using at the time I wrote this article) is very stable and would be a wise choice for Mac users.
Google has said that Wave will be released as Open Source, which makes a great deal of sense. It will take a lot of the pressure off of Google with respect to making the Wave software run more smoothly and reliably. One result of this will be that we will see Wave clients built for niche groups (perhaps including e-Learning applications) and vertical markets. We can also expect to see “white label” versions of Wave for internal use by organizations concerned about security, and perhaps encryption provisions as well.
Comments from users
Wave users seem to be generally fascinated by Wave, but they don't know what to do with it yet. The feature set remains somewhat mysterious, and it is difficult to get information about functionality.
Aaron Silvers made some valuable observations (in the course of a wave) about his experience and the experience of others:
- “Waves need to have a specific focus, otherwise it’s just a chat, and there are better mediums for that.”
- “Waves that don’t have a specific focus need roles to help manage the threads.”
- “Waves need maintenance. Stuff can be consolidated/deleted/cleaned. It’s a collaboration tool – people have to work/negotiate with each other.”
- “By virtue of sharing something in a wave with others, the default expectation is that someone WILL edit what you say. It is not an authoring platform to exchange ideas. It’s a platform to converge ideas.”
- “Facilitated/hosted waves need organization, maybe even design or Wave “templates.” Much like #lrnchat (Editor’s Note: running discussions on Twitter about learning) is organized with a warmup question and three ensuing questions, maybe a good wave needs to use blips or wavelets as conventions for certain types of group discussion or group work.”
What does this have to do with e-Learning?
Wave user Gregory P. Sweet, Certified SLE (Synchronous Learning Expert) with the New York State Department of Health -- Health Research, Inc. in answer to a question about the ways that Wave might be useful in an e-Learning context, had this to say: “Are you kidding? Clear purpose for e-Learning? Wave, in my limited, humble experience is like spawn of a WebEx, Twitter, and Google docs! My head is swimming with ideas of how to combine Wave into my synchronous classes. It feels like a game-changer to me. As much as going from a stand-up traditional classroom to WebEx training center was.”
I have to say that I agree, and I’d like to add that these also seem like good applications for Wave, in addition to using it for various modalities of instruction, and for collaborative, cooperative, and constructive learning:
- Development team use
- Use during needs assessment
- Use with decision makers
- Collaboration on tasks such as content development
- Collaboration with Subject Matter Experts
- Project management use
- Tracking, reports, etc.
- Document process
- Beta testing/launch use – bug reports (Google is using it this way now)
I’ll be following the evolution of Google Wave closely, and you can expect to see more articles in Learning Solutions on this environment as it continues to mature.
