Thing 3 - Working Collaboratively

Hello,

Hopefully by now you will be getting to grips with blogging and keeping yourself very well-informed via RSS feeds and Twitter.

This fortnight we’re going to focus on tools that not only allow you to share, but allow you to collaborate on a piece of work.You may find these useful if you are working on projects with colleagues within your own Trust or in other libraries. Whilst you are exploring this Thing, have a think about ways in which this could be useful for your library users.

Thing 3 - Group Projects

Wikis

Wikis are the most obvious example of a Web 2.0 tool that allows people to collaborate on a piece of work. The word 'wiki' comes from a Hawaiian word meaning 'fast'. A wiki is a webpage that can be edited by anyone or a defined set of people from within the Web browser, no other editing tools are required. As it's all stored online and they often allow you to upload documents and other files, they can be a useful tool for groups collaborating on a piece of work.
The best known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, where anyone can go in and add or amend an entry and anyone can see the entries you have made. The lack of editorial control can make the information in Wikipedia unreliable so they have editorial guidance in place to try to ensure the quality of the entries and you can look back to see what changes have been made to a page. For some pages editorial control is restricted to registered users or even particular individuals. If you are setting up your own wiki you can usually set it to allow only certain people to access it and/or edit it.

Wiki software is available to download to your PC or you can use an online wiki tool. Freely available online wiki tools include WikiSpaces (which offers free spaces for higher education), WetPaint and PBWorks. There are lots more examples out there. You might like to explore WikiMatrix, which is a site that compares wiki sites.

Why use wikis?

But aren't wikis a bit 'old-hat' now? All very 2005/2006?

We've got Twitter and blogs now. Aren't they the Web 2.0 tools of choice?

It could be said that blogging software has replaced wikis - it's more intuitive, easier to set up and customise. But wikis can still be a useful way of storing documents that are linked in linear and non-linear ways and in enabling collaboration.

• Wikis are really great for managing project documentation. Especially projects which generate a lot of reports, minutes of meetings, plans and timetables. A project wiki is a great repository for all that information, enabling all members of the team, wherever they are located, to read, edit and upload all the material at a glance. Documents can easily be shuffled around and archived. A wiki discussion is much easier to retrieve and organise than an email thread.
• I am a member of a wiki used by our east of England Health Information Skills Group (EEHIST) which was set up using PBWorks. We use it to store the Minutes of our meetings, drafts of our training guides, our action Plan and to discuss issues of importance to this group. Each member receives an email when a new thread (discussion) or document has been added or edited on the wiki.
• Staff Intranet Several university libraries use wiki software to manage their staff intranet. The wiki operates as a content management system, combining both publicly available and restricted access documents.
• Staff Manual If you want to produce a document with multiple sections that you'd like staff to be able to edit or comment on, with those changes being tracked, a wiki might be the answer.

There are of course issues involved in allowing open editing of a wiki. In general, users are much more likely to add a comment to a blog post or perhaps offer a guest post than they are to edit a wiki page. It's perhaps easier to see how teachers might use wikis collaboratively, where students are obliged to contribute.

Wikis are still a great medium for archiving and publishing large quantities of documents, no matter how you obtained them.



Why might researchers, academics and clinicians want to use wikis?

• As with sharing social media tools, wikis can be used to share and disseminate ideas or reach a wider audience, to engage with the public, to invite comments and feedback.
• To invite other people to contribute their knowledge on a topic – ‘crowd sourcing’.
• For open peer review of articles.
• To invite updates for systematic reviews.
• To provide online collaborative portals of data, information or other resources in a particular field which may be used as reference sources.
• For sharing and developing educational materials.
• As a forum for debate and discussion, and a place to keep a record of discussions.
• To facilitate group work on projects by their students, increase student engagement or have students read and review the work of their peers.

Your Thing Task 1 : See if you can find any examples of wikis that might be of use to our user groups: academics, researchers, students or clinicians. You could try searching Google, searching the websites of HE institutions, or searching the literature for articles about good examples, or finding them any other way you can. If you find other good ways to identify wiki examples, why not share this information on your blog?

Google Docs/Google Drive

Google docs is an example of an Office 2.0 tool. Office 2.0 refers to online applications that allow you to create documents, spreadsheets etc. Instead of using software installed on your individual computer you are using software that is hosted in a remote ‘cloud’. This means you don’t need to be on your own computer to access your files, you just need a computer with an Internet connection. You also don’t need to worry about software upgrades and because everything is available over the Internet it facilitates sharing and collaboration.

The downsides can be that these applications currently have limited functionality compared to Microsoft Office, for example, and you are dependent on a decent Internet connection to access your files.

Google Docs (recently changed to Google Drive) allows you to share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings online. You can create them from scratch in Google Docs or upload them and amend them in Google Docs. This can be really useful for people who work in different departments or even different institutions who are collaborating on a piece of work and need to work on documents together.The authors of this course put together the whole course and shared it with each other via Google docs.

Other office 2.0 alternatives include Think Free Office and  Zoho Office Suite.


Scheduling meetings or events

Researchers often work in groups and may wish to arrange meetings, decide on deadlines or inform each other about conferences or other relevant events. Clinicians may have similar requirements if working together, for example to discuss a particular case or work on an audit or guideline. Social media tools are there to help us again. Here are some examples you might like to explore, although there are many others out there:

• Google calendar: As with many Google products, probably the lead player in this area. Lets you share your calendar with anyone, and invite people to events in your calendar.
• Doodle: A free tool for scheduling events between a group of people. It works by creating a poll which is sent out to the people you want to meet with by email. They then respond to the poll so you can select the most popular date and time.
• Meet-o-matic: Another free meeting scheduler that uses a simple web-form and emails people to ask them to select a preferred date and time.

Your Thing Task 2: Have a go at creating a document and then sharing it with a colleague via Google Drive.

• You have already created a Google account, so just sign in to your account and select Drive
• Click on create and either write from scratch or copy and paste an existing Word document
• Click on share and type the email address of the person you want to share it with

 Don't forget to blog about your experiences!

Thanks for completing Thing 3. The week beginning 29th October will be a Reflective Week and no Thing will be posted. This gives you an opportunity to reflect (and blog about) the Things you have encountered so far, or to catch up if you have fallen a little behind.

The next thing will be posted on 5th November. Enjoy your week off and remember to keep blogging!