Collaborative Tools Project

I was really impressed with Kissflow ( which integrates with Google Apps ), a tool for running processes.  I'm working with lots of departments at the moment that are doing, or trying to improve their processes using Google Spreadsheets but this may offer a more complete solution. It works like this.... First you design a form as if it was one big form for the entire process, with different sections.  Next, you create a diagram of your workflow that can contain, approval requests, requests for more information, and queries. You can also create parallel processes and I liked the way you can create sub-process blocks. At each stage you add the people who need to complete it. The next step is to then sort of define who needs to see which bits of information at which stage.  And finally you publish and initiate your process. I have created one to request to create a new programme. It basically goes, Create a request Get approval to...

Matthew Collins sent me an email recently about using Google+ Communities to share research funding opportunities and news within his department. What I find fascinating and useful to the rest of the university is that Matthew and the team in Archaeology are actively exploring other tools to do things ( like sharing tidbits of useful news ) out of email. That is to say, to say, "let's not use email anymore for this activity, let's use this new thing instead".  Quite often this can have some useful effects: People get less email People are happier to contribute to the new thing because they know that their creating content won't be a burden on other peoples' email in trays The new thing has features that email doesn't that are really handy ( like being able to share all the posts with the new member of the team ). A different model of consumption happens. Because we're finding lots of people turn off Google+ notifications which generate email ...

I have just met with a colleague who is using Google Forms to improve the Ethics Approval process for research projects. They are taking a slightly different path to the one I might have plumped for, and are creating, on-the-fly Google Documents, filling in the appropriate sections and then sending them to people to add comments to etc. We thought he may have worked himself into a corner because although there is a function to capture when people submit a form ( onFormSubmit() ), there isn't one to capture if you "allow the user to edit responses" - there's no onFormUpdate(). We created a workaround by having a time-based trigger that just checks to see if the updated_timestamp is greater than the last_checked_timestamp. The best part, for me, of working with my colleague was when I referred at some point to my JavaScript skills being far from honed and he asked "So is this JavaScript then?" and laughed incredulously. He was happily coding away without...

I went to an interesting workshop run by Simon Davis this week looking at using Google Apps in Education. I was there to demo Google Hangouts and unfortunately had a heap of technical problems ( my laptop battery died... oops! Note: never believe it when your battery says it has 2 hours of juice ). Luckily, I had a Hangout I'd prepared earlier. The best bit for me was Catherine Shawyer (right) showing how, in Education, they were using a variety of Google Apps with elegance and gusto. They used template Google Sites for portfolio work (shown below). They found the sheer reliability of Google Apps was hugely important given their students loss of trust having used other tools and simply lost work by accidentally clicking the back button or similar. Usability really matters. But their most enthusiastic use was in using Google Sites for the hugely valuable process of self assessment. Typically, this previously took place on paper that became increasingly dog-eared and was o...

This week, I saw presentations from students performing qualitative research in Archaeology. The focus of their projects was an Android/iPhone heritage app called York's Churches which   has been developed to encourage people to explore the life and history of York city centre churches. Go get the app for Android or iPhone  yourself, it's lovely. The students' projects involved a mixture of focus groups, ethnographic work and Google Forms with iPads to gather data. The projects were mainly looking at how they might better raise awareness of the application with tourists and what improvements mi The Google Forms and iPads were used in various ways, including... As a data capture tool when surveying members of the public They were used to demo the application on the street The forms were used to ease the transcribing of data they recorded with pen and paper, which might be questions that they answered themselves ( for example, "Did they se...

The Idea +Sara Perry  in Archaeology has been using Blogger to support a project in which her students create an "object narrative" that tells us the story of a museum exhibit. The project, in flipping the students' perspective around on the objects on display gets them to think differently about museums and exhibitions. In a workshop, each of the students, having chosen an object ( from a crystal skull to a penny to a bike to a Christmas bauble etc ) were guided through creating a blog and began telling their object's story. What We Did We created a central aggregator blog that subscribed to the feeds of each of the students' blogs, creating a point from which the students, and Sara could easily get to each of the latest posts. We did this using the simple RSS gadget in the Layout Editor. Like this ... The bottom half of this blog ended looking like this... ... creating a useful "Starting Point" for exploring the objects'...

Google's announcement that Google Forms have been refreshed was welcome, it's always encouraging when a company updates a core tool you and your colleagues regularly use.... like say, Blogger. For example. Ahem. Ahem. Anyway, watching the videos about what had changed I notice that they've added the ability to share editing/viewing forms with people. That's great but it's sort of what I come to expect from Google, that nice Share dialog in many ways IS Google Apps. It doesn't feel like an innovation, it feels like a neglected corner being given a spring clean. The relationship between Forms and Spreadsheets has been altered. It's never been clear that when you create a Form a Spreadsheet will magically be created for the results and now you can have a Form that doesn't have an associated Spreadsheet. I'm not sure if they've made it clearer, just different. We'll see. And the demo in the video above, of being able to copy a list of ...