Log 2-Reflections on working collaboratively using Google Docs

Google Docs is a great way to store and share documents, and in that sense it is very similar to Delicious. You can choose what you wish to upload whether it’s saved work from your computer, USB or simply from the internet. Once you have chosen what you want and completed the upload into Google Docs it stays safe in your own library.

I have been using Google Docs to store my personal data and excerpts of my own work e.g. copies of my dissertation chapters and PGCE applications, whereas I have been storing information not directly from myself on Delicious. Why? Well to be honest I am more than happy to be bookmarking and sharing work that has been published by somebody else, it was their personal choice to make it accessible to people worldwide and benefit someone else’s learning. After all I have personally learnt a lot from bookmarking and sharing myself, however I’m not entirely comfortable with sharing my work. Reasons being I feel that my work is something I have created and spent many hours writing and is a reflection of me and my capabilities. I therefore am not comfortable with sharing examples of my work with people that I don’t know when I can’t guarantee that it’s going to benefit them. My work is not at a stage where I am completely satisfied with it yet, it is still developing because I am still developing my skills. I am a perfectionist and a performer; I think it’s natural not to want to submit anything that isn’t perfect to a public I don’t know.

I have however shared my personal work with Danielle Stacey. Danielle and I started collaborating via our personal emails as this was more personal than commenting on the blog and our hotmail was something that we both accessed on a daily basis, as we both agreed that visiting our blogs took more time than reading personal emails as we both tended to start visiting other peoples sites which is time consuming.

At the heart of Google Docs is a wiki a collaborative or shared document that people can edit, add, subtract or contribute to the development of a document. The most popular wiki is Wikipedia and this online encyclopaedia brings together users from around the world, therefore there is no one editor as it is edited by the community. I recently contributed to a wiki shared by some members of the BAPP course about “What does professional practice mean?” This was a way of reading how people define professional practice and broaden the minds of others.
Overall I was dubious about setting up Google docs because of time however If in the future I carry out further research, I will endeavour to use Google Docs and I will use the time to make the most of the applications.