Google Proves Massively Useful Once Again; Continues To Try To Dominate World (Google Docs)

One of my former students (Thanks, Meg!) sent me the big news: Google has added real-time, collaborative editing to Google Docs. This means that you and up to 9 collaborators can jump on a single Google Doc and simultaneously type and edit.

While this may not appear to support Google's attempt at world domination to quite the extent the headline to this post makes it seem (whew!), it does.

Previously, a wonderful little online product called Etherpad was the only such real-time collaborative tool available. Lots of people loved it but, when Google (the plot thickens...) bought it out a few months ago, the people who wept loudest were -- wait for it -- teachers.

I myself had used it in the classroom. It was easy and efficient and got students working together quickly without a whole lot of admin fuss and bother. The final collaborative product wasn't very pretty (no real formatting options) but, once the content was agreed upon by the students working on the project, it was easy to move that content into Word or PowerPoint or, for that matter, Google Docs, to pretty it up.

For those of you who did not have a chance to experience the magic of Etherpad, you can still see what all the fuss was about. Google (kindly) made the code for Etherpad open-source and several people developed almost identical clones of the product (my favorite is Typewith.me). I strongly encourage you to find a buddy or two and use this product. Everyone who has played with it, loves it.

Particularly teachers.

Where teachers go, students are sure to follow. Once you have had a taste of the speed, the increased level of intellectual engagement and, frankly, the fun of real-time collaboration, it will be very difficult to go back to the old emailing-the-doc-around-sort-of-thing. Google is more than happy to share its apps with schools and over 7 million students currently use them. Students (at least here at Mercyhurst) are already using Google products extensively and Google has just given the millennials one more reason to go Google and stay Google.

I have a couple of gripes, though. First it seems you have to have a Google account to set up a Google Doc. It is unclear whether or not you have to have a Google account to access the doc (We tried this in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class today and people with Mercyhurst addresses could not access the site while people with Gmail addresses could). This was not the case with Etherpad.

Likewise, you can only have 10 active collaborators at a time (though more can view the doc). While I recognize that teachers and classes aren't the only audience for this product, maybe in Mountain View they only have 10 students to a class but I would suggest that this is not the norm.

More importantly, some of the features demoed in the video below were not obviously available to us when we did get access. If the version we used this afternoon is supposed to look like the version in the video, it didn't -- and there was no obvious way to change it. We also experienced some lag in seeing each others' edits, something I had not experienced before with Etherpad.

Finally, the URL for sharing a doc looks like this: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AbJaj3wMNjkSZGhrcWs0ZGhfMjNodGRoam1jaA&hl=en

Not the easiest thing to share...

One thing you can count on with Google, though, is that it will continue to improve its flagship products. I may not like what they are currently offering ( I am sticking with Typewith.me for the time being) but I am virtually certain it will get better over time (and, in this case, fairly quickly, I expect).

Whether you like Google or you hate it, don't blink -- it is definitely coming to a document near you soon.



One last thought: My personal hope is that someone will take the open source Etherpad code and make an extension for MediaWiki. Can you imagine the increase in productivity (not to mention usage...) of Intellipedia with an extension that allowed easy real-time collaboration? Yoikes!

PowerPoint Templates? PowerPoint Alternatives? (Link List)

One of my students (Thanks, Jeff!) asked me this morning if I knew of any place to find high quality, free PowerPoint templates.

He had already looked at the MS Office template repository and had done the standard Google search and found the MS templates to be good but over-used by his classmates, the truly free offerings to be of fairly poor quality and the good quality templates to be out of his "poor college student's" price range.

I suggested that he use either Google's advanced search feature to look for .PPT files that were "free to use or share" or use one of the several PowerPoint specific search engines to help him find additional templates or backgrounds he could use.

Another alternative , of course, is simply not to use PowerPoint. There are a number of alternatives including, for example, Impress, which comes bundled with the OpenOffice Suite of software. OpenOffice is free and open source software which mimics (and in some cases improves) on MS Office's functionality. It works with most operating systems (including Windows and Mac).

Ever since I started using Ubuntu (a Linux distribution) on my laptop, I have been impressed with OpenOffice (which comes bundled automatically with Ubuntu). I have not had a chance to use Impress other than as a tool to view .PPT presentations but it has worked flawlessly. I also noticed that there were a number of free (and fairly attractive) template sites dedicated to Impress (an example of one is here).

If you look to online presentation applications, the alternatives seem even more robust. Rotorblog lists a number of options worth exploring. Two of these I have seen in action, Sliderocket and Prezi, and I think they could both be used to make a very interesting presentation.

Of course, the final option is to dramatically change your presentation style. We tend to focus on a "standard professional" style here at Mercyhurst that minimizes the flash and focuses more on substance.

There are a wide variety of other styles out there, however. Presentation Zen has captured some of them including the "Lessig Method", the "Godin Method", The "Kawasaki Method" and the "Takahashi Method". Not all of these methods are appropriate for intelligence briefings but there may well be some elements which can transfer effectively.

Have your own favorite tool, template source or presentation style? Leave a comment!

SNOWINT (CommunityWalk)

Want to know the odds that your location will have a white Christmas? Check out this map made using one of my favorite online custom mapping tools, CommunityWalk...

CommunityWalk Map - What are the odds of a White Christmas?

Using Craigslist To Fight Crime (StPaulChurch10-21.Wikispaces.com)

The effort to crowdsource a solution to the rash of church burglaries in St. Paul has been making some headway of late. One of the more interesting products to come out of the effort is a whitepaper on how to automate the collection of data using the RSS feeds from Craigslist.

Craigslist is an online classified advertising service that is available for many towns and cities. It is no surprise then that criminals try to use it to fence stolen goods. This is not a new phenomena (criminals use whatever is available and popular to sell stolen property -- pawn shops, flea markets, even, upon occasion, print classifieds). Craigslist cooperates with local law enforcement to keep their trade legit but, given the volume of listings, there is no way they can eliminate all of the traffic.

Being able to quickly scan Craigslist for known stolen items, then, seems to be a valuable tool in the law enforcement analyst's arsenal. Mike Himley, President and CEO of Eagle Intelligence, and a major contributor to the crowdsourcing effort on the St. Paul's churches, has come up with a simple tutorial that allows anyone to set up such a scan. I could easily imagine this as a part of a classroom exercise or as a real tool to help law enforcement identify and recover stolen property.

Even if the St. Paul Church Burglary crowdsourcing initiative does nothing but add these kinds of tools to the analyst's arsenal, it has been more than worth the effort.

TimeSpace News Exploration Tool (Washington Post via Information Aesthetics)

Information Aesthetics points to a useful tool for tracking and accessing the news available through the Washington Post. Called TimeSpace, it is an interactive Google map with a variety of tools that allow the reader to explore the news at different times of day, from a geographic perspective, with respect to certain keywords or all of the above.