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Real-time College Journalism Classroom Research Project on Google Wave

I met with a trusted friend last week who works on the front lines of the convergence of mainstream media and emerging digital media for a New York-based network news outfit.

As always, I wanted to learn from him to take back to my online journalism classes. I was asking him about new applications and we got onto Google Wave. “Are you using it in class?” he asked. “Um, no,” I said. “It’s just too new.”

Wave was released in late September. I use a lot of cutting-edge tools in my classroom but I usally don’t roll something out and release it to the students until I have played with it, experimented with it and gained some expertise in it. I just received my Wave invite a couple of weeks ago from the kindness of a former student and had opened it up once and that was it.

Then, on Monday, in class, one of my students asked me about Wave.

That did it, it was time to explore.  I use Google spreadsheets in class for collaborative projects and for group note taking. Students can instantly add links and see their work progress on the projector.

I set up a new page and asked the students to take five minutes to do some searches about Wave.

Predictably, they all went to the main Google page and the results they shared were pedestrian — of good general value but not terribly insightful.

We adjusted the search strategy by looking on Google News, Google images and on Twitter. I was disappointed that Twitter search has not become their first option, or, at least, their second. After this exercise, I feel it will. Real-time search is so incredibly valuable because of the crowd-filtering factor and the immediacy.

The next set of sites they shared were more useful and I asked the students to then write a slug about the particular post they had selected. Many used boilerplate descriptions and I asked them to try again, this time being conversational and sharing informally and the results were more interesting.

The last thing I asked them in this exercise was to then look for articles pertaining to journalism and Google’s Wave product.

Following are the links they discovered in this project that took approximately 20 minutes to complete:

• http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/11/09/using-google-wave-on-your-first-project-6-tips/   Gives a bit of insight into what you can do with it.              
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/26/why-google-wave-sucks/   A cynical but interesting look at Google Wave’s capabilities, such as boardroom and classroom collaborations.
• http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave.html  Description of how Google uses equal parts conversation and document in real time. Includes pictures, text, and video as well as feedback from other people.  Has applications to have data other than text- “Yes, no, maybe”  application, and GPS/map application, and photo sharing. Post Wave to blog through adding blog to have list-comments via blog appear in the Wave. If you respond in the Wave, it appears on your blog, too   
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html Official Google Blog. Wave could help collaboration between field reporters and the newsroom while following and creating a story.
• http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology/2009/11/25/google-testing-wave-style-new-search-interface-115875-21849630/           UK article on what Google Wave is                                                        
• http://www.whatisgooglewave.com/  Google Wave is a web platform that brings together w-mail, instant messaging, social networking and wikis, where collaborators are able to work together in real time                                
• http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/      http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/26/why-google-wave-sucks/      It is as if Google Wave is like a community meeting in which anyone can have a voice, regardless of how absurd it is. You share information, conversations, and documents in one space, as opposed to several different mediums. In terms of journalism: It allows a news station/paper to connect with their viewers/readers. The station/paper can start a running conversation with their viewers, allowing news to break in real time, and get real time reactions from people about the stories         
• http://mashable.com/2009/09/05/google-wave-ideas/ Google wave allows collaboration between any number of people. In terms of journalism this allows journalists and eyewitnesses to collaborate on a “Wave” - or page.                                      
• http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/tim-walker-google-wave-is-how-email-would-look-if-it-were-invented-yesterday-1830908.html  The complicated clutter of the Wave home page isn’t nearly as straightforward or simple to grasp as, say, Twitter or Facebook.
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Google-Wave/81197107774 A Facebook group .      
• http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2009/06/google_wave_the_next_social_media_phenom.php        What makes Google Wave particularly revolutionary is the real-time aspect.
• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=google+wave  On Twitter, a lot of people are trying to get invites and that it is complicated.

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