Google Wave for Decentralising Group Discussions

When Google Wave first launched some time ago it was met with an enormous hurrah of amazingness from many people in the tech community. Unfortunately the “game changing” realities of what Wave was supposedly going to evoke hasn’t eventuated, however that hasn’t stopped me from checking in on the application from time to time to see how the development is going.

Now that the hysteria has died down I’m finding it a bit easier to look at the tool in a more objective sort of way, and this morning I in fact had an idea about a real use for it in an educational context.

The significance of embedded content

One of the glaring voids in the tool historically has been there was no embed option. So you had to go into Wave in order to edit anything, or contribute to any discussions. For me the fact there are so many other communication tools out there meant that Wave was largely forgotten and overlooked.

However this morning I’ve just noticed they’ve added in an embed option, which means you can include a real-time view of the wave discussion in any website or blog that allows use of the embed code. The fact it contains JavaScript is a bit unfortunate though, since many websites are likely to lock down use of these sorts of code snippets (I suspect WordPress.com is one of them).

Decentralising Centralised Discussion

Nonetheless, it seems to me that Wave would facilitate centralised discussions in a decentralised fashion.

One of the corner stones of many online courses is use of a discussion forum. The centralised nature of this tool is such that people can engage with one another to discuss and debate concepts and topics in a shared space.

Historically this has required use of a centralised tool like a group or learning management system, which effectively makes the online element course-centric as opposed to learner-centric. My thought was that Wave could mitigate this reality by allowing centralised discussions to be situated in many different locations all at the same time – including student blogs, learning management systems, groups, etcetera.

Students would then have the power to engage in the discussions in their own chosen contexts, while not losing out on valuable interaction with their peers and instructors.

An Example

For instance, below is a publicly visible wave I’ve created. Why not try entering a comment, and see if you can embed the snippet in your own context – if only temporarily. Largely this idea is untested, so I’d appreciate any collaboration or feedback people have on how well this idea works in practice.

Note, in order to make this Wave publicly visible and editably I’ve had to add public@a.gwave.com to the list of Wave participants. More on this here.

Update: After experimenting with this a bit it appears that the embed code snippet is only available from within Wave, rather than via the embedded instance. So students would theoretically need to visit Wave in the first to grab the snippet, and thereafter could enter comments through instances. It also appears that many of the options in the tool bar within Wave are unavailable outside of it.