Informational Networking

Google Wave will change how I work.  Actually, already has.  This article has been developed in Wave.  The first wave I made was named “What do I do with Google Wave?” I used it to list the wave uses I had found.  The first, blog development, is a natural fit to my work habits.  I start by collecting small units.  One idea.  The basis for one paragraph or so.  Just the size that will fit into one or two units on a wave.  Probably just right for my attention span. 

And – an aside – I have no invite authority with my copy of GoogleWave at this time.  So no point in asking me for an invitation now.  Maybe later. 

Don’t confuse Google networking with social networking.  GoogleWave is for collaboration. On tasks.  In the past, I called this task literature research.  Now I will call it informational networking.  Sharing the collection and organization of information with other people.  Here is how it works.
 
I copy-paste text from a web page.  I pick up the link and put it next in the wave.  It stays live, so I can go back and review the page on rewrite. There is also a spelling check, so I can produce copy-ready content.  But where is the sharing?  So easy you don’t notice it.

I put Butch Dae on the wave.  He sees all the items I put in that wave.  He can look at the developing content and offer suggestions.  Butch is much interested in using Wave for information collection and retrieval.  So he had some questions about how to use waves to organize ideas and concepts.   That does not come up in writing a blog, so I might not have thought about it right now.  But Butch pointed it out.

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Organizing a collection of information

Three steps: 

• Copy and store items.
• Share items
• Organize items

In Wave, the first two steps are easy. I find a web page I want to work with. The page is in my browser. I have the url and some useful text in front of me. I probably have Wave running in a separate browser instance so I can easily copy from the text page to the wave. I put one item in one or two segments (maybe called a blip).   Just copy-paste the url and the key text.

The url is live and will open in another window if I click on it. The item is now stored and shared with Butch and anyone else I want to share this wave with. This is so convenient I may use it to store web links that I use frequently, especially those I might want to share.

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Tagging Waves

A wave is a single thread: A single concept or conversation.  Probably like a section in the old-fashioned kind of article I used to write.  With multiple concepts, you would have one wave for each concept.  You organize concepts mainly by grouping them.  Google offers two ways to group waves: tags and folders.  I think tags are the probably the most useful.  You would group waves together by giving them the same tag. 

You can easily call up grouped waves with the same tag.  Google offers special syntax for tag search.  Since you can apply (and remove) multiple tags, you can put one wave in several categories.  That is quite useful because the category you want depends on your objective.  I am interested in networks of communities in communication.  So I will put fiber optics and coaxial cable in the same category.  High bandwidth transmission.  Someone who is interested in the technology of fiber optics would object that the two technologies have practically nothing in common.  With Wave, we could each have an organization to suit us. 
  
I am inclined to use a simple one-level scheme to create new waves.  For example, I ran into the concept: Informing Science (the science of informing).  I made a wave with that name and collected a few units of information.  They are in another section of this article. 

Informing Science is also an area of interest to Butch Dae, so I shared this wave with him.  He will probably add other items in the future. So will I.   That will give me a continuing stream of information on this subject, so I will probably be covering it here from time to time.  Especially since I see GoogleWave as a promising tool for Informing Science

But organization in Wave does not require a commitment.  Change is easy.  And my collaborators can each have a customized organizational arrangement.  For example, I will probably want to organize things to fit my blogging needs. Butch may organize things differently. We can each attach tags to a wave to collect them for a particular purpose. 

I may have several waves that I want to use in my next blog. I can tag each with blog. Then I can search for that tag and bring up just the waves with that tag. When I finish that blog, I can remove that tag from waves that are not relevant to the next upcoming blog.

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Embedding Google Wave into Blackboard

Educators are taking an interest in Wave, as indicated by this article.  I have not yet explored the use of embedding with Wave, but I will, and will report on it in a later article. 
 
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Collaborative Stories?

You get a bunch of writers.  Start a wave:

“Dammit,” said the actress to the bishop, “get your hand off my thigh!”

Then the writers carry on the story from there.  Vary the rules and get various products.

Who is doing this?  Nobody that I know of. 

Yet.

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The Science of Informing

“The purpose of Informing Science is to encourage and enable the sharing of knowledge and collaboration among the wide variety of fields that use information technology to inform clients. Here are some of these areas:

“Communications, Communicating Meaning, Community and Society, Computer Science, Data Communications, Distance Education, eCommerce, Education, Government, Health Care, Medicine, History, Information Science & Library, Journalism, Justice and Law, Mathematics, Philosophical Issues, Psychology, Public Policy, Sociology, Technology, Working Together.”

Call for paricipation in te 2010 Conference

One part of the conference focuses on topics related to using IT to teach: e-Learning, m-Learning, making classroom teaching more effective, and distance learning.  Another part focuses on informing clients, students, and people in general. 

Proceedings of the conference for this year.

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