It’s been another busy week, both in life and in the Center, but I’ve been brainstorming. I was really disappointed with the response my post on Peer Centered received. I was hoping for some more positive feedback or at least a “hey that’s a good idea”, but I have yet to run across anything like that. Instead it’s been a bunch of “that will never work” or “that’s not what the Center is for.” Although I haven’t gotten the response I wanted, I still feel it would be a great venue for our Center to explore and each time I share the concept with someone else in our Center, they seem to think it’s a good idea.
I actually was talking to Jenny earlier today and we got to talking about new ideas for our Center. She expressed to me that she would like to see our Center embrace embedded Word comments for our email consults. I think this would be a great idea! But, how would we implement this for our Center? It would be difficult because there are so many different versions of Word and many people are still unfamiliar with comments. Then, you’d have to tackle the computability issue--PC vs. Mac and newer computers vs. older. Anyway, we grappled with it for a few minutes and then I had an idea. What about Google Docs?
Google Docs is available to every BSU student via their Bronco Mail and it is all web-based (thus, axing the computability issues). It’s also really easy to use. Anyone who is familiar with a word processor should be able to catch on to its features very easily--there are also a ton of Google “how to” videos on YouTube to help--and they are directly built in to the document’s help screen! Google Docs is bare bones, but that may not be a bad thing and it could be very effective for our email consults. Through Bronco Mail’s system we can easily share documents with anyone that has a Bronco Mail email address (every student and faculty member at BSU). Documents can also be shared with us--The Writing Center--so that we can comment and give feedback. Another benefit to using Google Docs is that we would no longer have a formatting problem. Since a Google Document looks the same on a Writing Center Screen as it will on any other student’s. This would help us be more effective with formatting questions in email consultations. Google Docs also gives the user the opportunity to create templates, both for sharing with a group or for our own person use. How cool! I’m sure there are a lot of great benefits that I am forgetting about, but I think this is a good idea worth exploring. I used Google Docs for my EdTech class and it was very easy to get the hang of and great for collaborating!
Google Docs would be a good venue for allowing embedded comments, Ryan--I think the trick would be figuring out how to accept (and not accept) submissions. Certainly worth looking into.
ReplyDeleteHi, Ryan.
ReplyDeleteI must admit, I was also a bit disappointed with the responses to your post on PeerCentered, though I'm not entirely surprised--I knew there were inherent problems with the concept of doing something different for one portion of the population, but I was hoping that someone from another center would have already come up with a solution to that issue. No such luck. Bugger. That doesn't prevent us, however, from continuing to think through possible solutions that we may be able to share sometime in the future.
And, yes, Google Docs certainly is a way to allow for embedded comments. But I think our Center has resisted such technologies because folks from the past (largely Mike, would be my guess) decided to push our consultants away from line-by-line commenting, which is much easier to do when you can embed comments--and, I agree. I think it is A LOT harder to respond the way we do, and that's a good thing--it pushes our consultants to respond more globally in emails, which then in turn helps them think more globally in their other sessions.
I, of course, am not opposed to reconsidering the way we do things in our Center, so keep up with the ideas, Ryan!
mk