Google Wave is out!
In a previous article, I wrote about a new web communication protocol being developed by Google called Google Wave. Well, five months later, I finally have my Google Wave developer’s preview invitation and I can start creating waves and experimenting with my very own account.
Embedded in this article below is a Wave hosted on wave.google.com. Unfortunately, Google Wave hasn’t gone fully public yet so the only people who can see and interact with the embedded Wave are other developers with preview accounts. For the vast majority of readers of my blog, I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with a snapshot image of how it looked when I first wrote this article. Due to the dynamic and collaborative nature of Waves, this one will change over time as more people make their own contributions. Eventually, when Google Wave goes public, you’ll be able to see it, interact with it, post your own comments, add images and files, gadgets, etc.
There’s a buzz in the air
There’s a great atmosphere of buzzy anticipation among the privileged few who have developer preview accounts and the growing community is constantly speculating about how this will shape the future of web communications. I believe that this new protocol, which is open source and available to everyone, will bring about a revolution in on-line communication and collaboration. Google are promoting it as a replacement for email, although I personally doubt that this will be the case. I think it certainly will have a huge impact on social networking. How this will unfold, we can only wait and see.
How will it affect e-learning?
As I wrote in my previous blog post on Google Wave, I think this new protocol is particularly relevant to e-learning and learning management systems. At the moment, having these real-time, on-line, communicative and collaborative tools comes with a hefty price tag and companies such as WebEx (Cisco Systems) and Adobe Connect charge such high prices for their services that only large corporations and organisations with big budgets can afford to use them. Google Wave promises to level the playing field and make high-end web telecommunications as cheap and easy to use as email. Expect to see web conferencing and real-time on-line classrooms at a school, college, academy or university near you soon!
Also, since it’s an open protocol and the software is open source, anyone can create gadgets, plugins and interfaces for it. Propelled by heavy demand, Google are already setting up a marketplace for them as we speak. I expect most of the new applications will be available for free. I can already see learning management system developers scrambling to create plugins that will leverage Waves for e-learning purposes. For learners at least, the future looks bright, the future looks exciting.
Here’s a static snapshot taken at the time of publishing:
Tags: e-learning, Google, LMS, Moodle, social networking, VLE
By Marc, October 28, 2009 @ 3:12 am
I think this protocol has a long way to go to to be competitive with existing protocols, in no small part because it is so flexible. But it is so CPU intensive that doing anything of value can bring anything but the bleeding edge to a halt.
Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and someone will pay the piper. The golden future of free media-rich unlimited bandwidth with tiny systems woven into our clothes will likely have to give way to paying off Wall Street greed and middle eastern adventurism.
In the meantime there is nothing at this point that an instructor can’t do quicker, cheaper and easier with OpenFire, DimDim, Mediawiki, WordPress, or Moodle. That is not to say one should ignore wave, but many students can barely manage SMS, so maybe we might want to consider that when technology ceases to be an effective tool it becomes an obstacle to education, and I have seen way to many situations where education has gone by the wayside because the emperor is playing with his new toys ;=}
We have had asciimath running in wave as well as jsxgraph, have done 6rounds webcam meetings as well as a host of other gadgets and bots including tweety and wave notice and I have played with the xml of some of the gadgets, so I have an idea of what wave could do, but as free form as it is and as resource intensive as it is this is in my opinion not a likely candidate for synchronous use by elementary or secondary students. Additionally, the replay feature is painful when it comes to actually needing to use it.
Yes, the folk at Google get As for creativity, but without “rules” as we see have developed for use of other protocols, wave is the height of anarchy, and anarchy while perhaps offering individual freedom, is hell on collaboration ;=}
By rvt, October 28, 2009 @ 4:17 am
The problem with most, if not all google services is that they look so… Hummm googlish…
boring blue headers and highly un-organized.
Biggest problem, as far as I can tell is that google ‘owns’ the data, not you, not your company but google. So if google pulls a plug, your company goes down the drain with it (goole has been doing a un-plug before…). As usual, google doesn’t guarantee anything (it’s beta and free, right??)
So… it’s all great and dandy, but can I run it on MY server? so I don’t rely at ALL on ANY of google’s infrastructure? If the answer is no, then for me it’s nice they created it… But I am not going to advice any client of mine to use it because there is a change they loose data of google is doing something odd.
How do I create backups of data? How can I restore a dataset? How do I give a client a copy of the backup? What’s there uptime (google’s uptime for some services far more horribly then a hobby server now days) How do I migrate it to some other platform? For to many questions Google is a faugh answer for Google tries not to be evil… but there are little devils running on google neck, better watch for the cloud, it might rain one day…
Ries
By Matt, October 29, 2009 @ 1:14 am
I’ve been looking at some of the plugins and extensions that are quickly turning out for Google Wave. There’s a list of them here: http://sites.google.com/site/gwaveextensions/extensions-list It’s a long list already and it’s going to take a while to look through them and to find possible uses for them.
So far, I’m impressed. It’s pretty easy to embed just about anything into a Wave. I’ve embedded my main website splash page, which is a large interactive Flash application with a flying cube that users can “throw” around. It works perfectly.
I’m gonna keep on experimenting.