[TIPS] - Web 2.0 example

Check out this scenario that would not have been possible just a couple of years ago.

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In last night's online Grad class (from Bloom) my group of four was given the daunting task to develop a lengthy presentation for next Thursday. YIKES! How were we going to work together as a group to accomplish this? We had to settle on the topic, outline, details, and finally the building of the presentation itself.

 

Enter writely.com (remember it from a previous tip?)

 

I created a document at www.writely.com and typed in the basic shell of the assignment along with MY proposed solution for it. I then clicked the collaborate button and entered the email addresses of the other three in the class and the site sent them an invitation to work on this document. We can work on it either synchronously or asynchronously, so we COULD join our live Centra class to gain access to the voice communication tool, then log into writely.com and all work on the file together. Each person's additions are color coded so we know who is adding what. We can also choose to save the file to our hard drive, as well so we can work on it later without going online, but this copy stays online.

 

Cool? it gets better.

 

I then went into my bloglines account and, using the RSS feed from our document in Writely.com, I subscribed to that document. That means that anytime one of our group gets in there and makes changes I'll get notified in bloglines (and on my homepage in Firefox) of that change.

 

How cool is that? THAT is why they call it The Read/Write Web.