Google has announced two new features for Wave, its online tool for real-time communication and collaboration (still in “Preview” with a limited, though growing, group of users). These new capabilities, along with the “Undo/Redo” editing feature added in December, are important to business use and dedicated Wave-ers will welcome them.
For basic information on Wave and the terminology used with it, please see Catching the Google Wave, Learning Solutions Magazine, November 2, 2009. For clarification here, “Wave” refers to the online tool, while “wave” refers to an ongoing discussion or other content. This follows the usage by the developer team on the official Google Wave weblog.
Read-only capability
With large groups of people on a wave, all of them able to leave comments and to edit content, following a conversation or getting anything useful done has sometimes been difficult.
It is now possible for the creator of a wave to set the access levels of other participants to “read-only” or to “full access.” Click on the picture of a participant in the Wave and change that person’s access level on the drop-down menu. The creator of a Wave can also make groups read-only (including the Public group). (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: A drop-down menu makes it possible to set access levels for individuals or for groups.
Read-only participants cannot make any changes to the wave, including adding new participants. They can view live changes to the wave, and they can look at the wave history in playback. Individual permissions override group permissions. If a group has full access, the wave creator can still restrict an individual to read-only access, and vice versa.
Restore from Playback
Playback allows users to view a wave at any point in order to see what participants said, and to review how a wave developed over time.
Anyone with full access to a wave can now restore that wave to any previous state visible in playback. Restoring does not delete anything from the playback history. It adds the restored state to the end of the history. The purpose of this is to allow users to correct mistakes they or others made in a wave.
How can you use these features?
There are several uses for these features in e-Learning, whether during development or during delivery of instruction.
Read-only would be important as-is to a designer conducting a need assessment or a focus group, or simply managing a group of subject-matter experts. It would also be useful to project managers who have set up a wiki or other control documents in a wave.
In addition, the Wave team at Google reports that it is planning to introduce a third access setting called “Reply-only” that would let users add new blips (individual messages), but prevent them from editing blips they did not create. The team is also re-designing the interface to let the wave creator change permissions for several participants more easily. When available, these will be very important to managing synchronous events in a wave.
The combination of read-only and restore is most useful at this point for keeping a discussion on-track. The wave creator can change permissions for participants as needed, and then restore the wave to a point before the drift off-topic began.
Keeping up
We will continue to keep Learning Solutions readers posted on Wave’s progress. In addition, on Thursday, March 25 at the Learning Solutions Conference & Expo, Roger Mundell, CEO of Udutu Online Learning, will deliver Session 611, “Rapid Deployment Leveraging Social Networks and Google Wave.”
