Google announced Wave on May 27, 2009 – only 5 months ago. Since that time, there’s been a lot of excitement, hype, anticipation, speculation, and, in some cases, bad information. I’d like to share with you what I’ve managed to learn about Wave so far. My only promise is that I will stay away from the hype and speculation, and to the best of my ability I’ll avoid any bad information. I admit to being a little excited by what I’ve seen.
Mostly I’m doing this because so few people have been able to land an invitation to use Wave, and so many e-Learning practitioners want to know what Wave is about. Today there are about 800,000 users in the preview. “Preview” is kind of a funny word. Wave is not released. It isn’t even in beta. It’s in “preview,” which is apparently a step before beta.
One thing you should know, if you receive an invitation in the coming weeks, is that Wave is changing every day. Lots of features, ones that you might expect to work, are non-functional or not implemented. That's why access is limited. Wave is not intended for widespread use at this point. You can't moderate conversations very easily (yet), conduct a Webinar (yet), or even get things back out of the trash (yet). What worked yesterday may not work today, and what works today may work differently tomorrow, or it may be gone. So when you get your invitation, be patient. My guess is that it will be a year before Wave is stable.
What is Wave?
Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool" (the official description). It is Web-based: all you need to use it is a browser or a client, such as WaveBoard (more about that later). Wave combines capabilities that function in a way analogous to e-mail, instant messaging (IM), text chat, discussion boards, wikis, and certain social networking features (or will combine – remember, I said a lot of intended features aren’t available yet). It can already communicate outbound to external sites and systems, such as Twitter and Weblogs, and it can send messages to users via conventional e-Mail.
Wave can function as a synchronous communication platform when users happen to be online at the same time. It can function asynchronously when they are not. If you have a chat session with another user in real time, Wave will save the session as a wave so that you (and other users whom you select) can come back to read it and even edit it later. Because the software stores the history of a wave (conversation thread) in the wave itself, users can follow a discussion and changes to the discussion (wiki-like editing) later.
(Editor's note: We are following the usage of the Wave development team on the official Google Wave weblog, when it comes to capitalization of the various terms used in discussing Wave. So, for example, "Wave" refers to the tool itself, while "wave" refers to a discussion thread or other content created by or stored in the tool.)
A wave can be public or private, and soon the person who started a wave will be able to make it “read only.” Users can collaborate on documents, which may be separate files that are uploaded from their desktops or the documents may be text and graphics inside “blips” (individual posts) within a wave. There are extensions that will do spelling and grammar checking, and there will soon be one that will translate to and from numerous languages.
I should repeat myself: everything about Wave changes constantly. By the time you read this, or by the time you get a Wave invitation, some of what I’ve just written may no longer be true (though I expect it will be), and much more may have been added to Wave. Don’t expect too much yet (many current users are expressing dissatisfaction because their expectations were so high), but I believe that it is very much true that “the best is yet to come.” One way to keep track of what’s going on is to follow the changes at http://www.waverz.com/news .
Collaborative software has been a hot growth area off and on for almost 20 years. The first examples were groupware, such as Lotus (later IBM) Notes and (what is now Microsoft) Groove. These first systems were complex, and placed heavy storage requirements on individual desktops, so it was only natural that Web-based apps would evolve. These are now evolving into what might be termed “cloud-based” collaborative tools, of which Wave and the numerous social software applications are prime examples.
What does Wave look like?
By default, Wave has a four-panel interface. (See Figure 1) The user can re-size or minimize these panels. When minimized, the panels dock at the top of the browser window and can function as drop-down menus. This is handy when working on documents or when there are large graphics in a wave.
The Contacts panel
Icons (generally photos, but not always) represent users. To add a user to one of your waves, drag and drop the user’s icon from your Contacts panel (see Figure 2) into the wave. You can remove a user from a wave that you started, although at present you must use a robot to do that, rather than being able to drag the icon back out. When you first get your Wave account, any contacts in your Gmail address book who also have Wave accounts will automatically appear in your Contacts panel. (You must have a Gmail account to use Wave, by the way.) You can also add Wave users to your Contacts by searching for them, or by opening the “Manage Contacts” link and typing their WavID.
The Navigation panel
The Navigation panel (Figure 3) provides control over what you see in the central panel (more in a moment), gives access to your account settings, makes it possible to store searches and waves, and also gives you a trashcan where you can drop waves that you no longer need. “Inbox” is for incoming waves. “By Me” is a link to all of your Waves. “Requests” is a link to waves to which (untrusted) users who are not in your Contacts invited you. “Spam” is self-explanatory; I haven’t seen any spam yet, but I have heard that it is already showing up. Using the Folders and the stored Searches in the Navigation panel is essential to efficient use of Wave – you will be amazed how quickly you accumulate waves, both public and private.
The Search panel
The center panel (Figure 4) is called the Search panel, mainly because the Search box is at the top. But if you open the Inbox link in the Navigation panel, any and all waves in it will appear in the Search panel. The same is true if you open, for example, one of your folders. The ribbon at the top of the Search panel makes it possible to Archive or Mute waves (placing them temporarily out of sight), to move waves to your Inbox or to Spam, and so on. The ellipsis at the end of the ribbon opens up a drop-down menu of other functions, such as moving a wave to a different Folder.
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.
