Hey yall’

There is a group of us using writely (just like Microsoft Word but by Google) so that anyone who wants to can be involved in collaborating notes for each lecture. Here is how it will work.

I post my notes each day on writely after class. Everyone else in the class can get on the same notes to read them, edit them, add to them, or share them with even more class members or others you think would like to see them. You can also view them if you miss class. We have collaborated like this in some other classes and it works great.

Just let me know if you want to be a part of our group and I will send you an email with a link to each days notes.

Thanks
Jeff Harmon

Within 30 seconds of sending this email out, I received 2 responses. In the next 16 hours I had more than 50 peers asking for links to collaborate(writely only allows 50)! Everyone LOVED the idea. I was blown away. By the time I got done inviting them all, I wished writely would connect straight into my Gmail groups so that I could just send invites to a group. It was a pain to copy all those emails in. Google should pay me for this. I not only just invited 50 users to writely, but I also just converted about three-quarters of those to get Gmail accounts (you have to have a Gmail account to use writely).

Talk about viral marketing.

Here are some other ways I have used writely:

1. I wrote my essay application to BYU on writely. At the same time I was writing the application, my sister-in-law in Oregon was editing it.
2. The other morning, 1 hour before my paper was due, my mom—850 miles away—collaborated with me to get a project done. We were on the phone talking while we both looked at the same document. I could see as she made corrections, ALL REAL TIME!
3. Yesterday, Daniel and I learned that we had to push out a, 700+ word, press release for iMemoryBook in less than a day. We had at least three people working on the document from two states. It was a synergistic experience. Theron, my brother helping to edit the document from Oregon, was talking to Daniel on the phone. New to writely, Theron asked, “So we can write on this at the exact same time?… wow, this like a wickipedia deathmatch!”
4. I have used writely for several group projects.

Collaboration is King

The power of writely and zoho writer is completely derived from cleanly executed collaboration. There are also spreadsheet collaboration systems from Zoho and Google (these are not near effective enough to replace Excel in most situations yet). Here at FamilyLearn we followed these principles and have created a powerful online collaboration system for families to create and print: wedding books, anniversary books, retirement books, teacher books, family histories, and all kinds of other books. It is called iMemoryBook (the internet memory book). Snapfish recently released sharing/collaboration online as well for creating their photo books. There are countless other collaborative project springing up each year. I think it was Paul Allen who told me that the original guys who started the internet had collaboration in mind as the internet’s primary purpose.

So… how long will it be before we can invite anyone we would like to collaborate with us in, an email document, or even a common blog entry, online photo sharing, family home video editing, and pretty much any thing else? In five years I could see a “collaborate” button as common as spell check on any rich text editing system. Just watch, it is too helpful to not happen.

Share This