I first experienced "Google Wave" last year (2010) during the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) conference in Penang when Google themselves demonstrated it. At the time the Wave was still in Google labs (and it still is) getting fine tuned. However there was no doubt how cool it was with respect to facilitating online collaboration. Almost a year later (2011), I attended a workshop on Open Educational,l Resources (OER) which promotes openness in education, content and assessment and discovered Typewith.me powered by the Etherpad Foundation which was similar to the Google Wave in design but promoted more openness. One feature which differentiates Typewith.me from Google Wave is the simple fact that you will not need to logon to collaborate. i.e. it indeed promotes more openness with respect to access.
If you are a new age educator (a fancy way of saying teachers who use the internet), you will appreciate the power of this simple tool as it will allow you and your students to collaboratively work on a document. One scenario would be that you post a few questions in the initial document and allow your students to comment, edit and re-shape the document in real-time. This could be in a classroom while the students are physically there or offline (maybe as homework) when the students are at home. If you are a project manager who collaborates daily with your team, I have no doubt you will also realise the value of this tool to collaboratively share ideas, brainstorm and build. Another possible application for education would be to use this platform to encourage group work and group projects among students. With face-to-face contact time getting dearer by the day, a virtula collaboration of this sort might be the key to facilitating group work even in a distance learning environment.
Interested? Well here's how you do it:
Step 1: Go to Typewith.my and click on "Click to Create a New Document". This will create a new document which you can use to collaborate.
Step 2: Put in your name. The system will assign you a colour. This colour will be used to highlight your work in the document. Ecah of the collaborators will also be assigned a unique colour which will highlight their individual work. However the number of collaborators per project has been limited to 16 for some reason. This could be due to the availability of colours or due to the fact that it doesn't make any sense to have more than 16 people working on one document. Whatever the case you will have to work around 16 users.
Step 3: Share the URL so that the collaborators can find the document. You can e-mail it directly useing the system as well or you can IM the link.
Step 4: Start working on your document exactly the way you would work with any text editor.
Step 5: You can chat with all the collaborators while you work on the document using the chat console. This allows you to share ideas and discuss while working on the document.
Step 6: You can also use an existing document as the base document using the import feature or you can export your document which you have worked on using the export feature.
These steps should get you started. There are many other features you can play around with as well. Once you get started, you will be able to use this platform for many other activities and applications as well.
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