Comments on: Wave, ripple, and flow

By: Brad

Brad — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:57:53 +0000

I feel that I am cautiously optimistic about wave, but when compared to all the haters, I seem like a giddy wave fanboy.

Wave is a protocol, but people are evaluating it like a service. The details of the usability of the client isn’t what it is about right now. No doubt the client needs to improve and it will.

I find it hard not to feel the spark you talk about, Alan, when I try out all the various robots and gadgets and start to think of what might be built on this platform one day.

By: Frank Lowney

Frank Lowney — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:35:28 +0000

It’s not just Wave, it’s the idea that communication has to be immediate to be productive of good things. What we see with Wave, blogs, Twitter, IM and so on is many people talking and few actually listening and reflecting upon what they have heard.

This is fine for topics that are ephemeral or not so dependent upon facts and reasoning. Matters of taste might do well but matters of fact or matters of opinion that rest upon facts and reason will not.

So lets start a wave about our tastes in ice cream, music and vacation destinations but leave things like social policy to other venues.

By: Ruben Puentedura

Ruben Puentedura — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:11:22 +0000

I like the promise of Wave – but I think that it needs some serious interface design work to make it usable. Currently, the interface is simply not adequate: traditional email plus chat lists won’t cut it here. One simple example: the “wave playback” is conceived as a simple linear movie – but something akin to a dynamic subway map would be a much more appropriate metaphor here. If I were running this project at Google, I would pick up the phone and call Ed Tufte and Ben Schneiderman pronto – in fact, I think I’ll submit that as part of my beta tester feedback…

By: Google Wave Use Cases: Education - Cole Camplese: Learning and Innovation

Google Wave Use Cases: Education - Cole Camplese: Learning and Innovation — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:32:03 +0000

[...] CogDog talks about disappointment and even I got into a little Twitter sparring with Stephen Downes over what is/isn’t. I think we’ll know more and (a) more of us get account and (b) new extensions emerge that live on top of this platform. The piece quoted below starts the conversation that I think we need to continue to have. Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let’s start with the education sector. We’ll explore other use cases in upcoming posts. [...]

By: Devon

Devon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:49:01 +0000

Yeah, I’m not sure yet either. It’s too damn slow… even if I am between 5 people or 105 people. I made a new wave by myself yesterday and that sucked, too. Nada. Ew. It’s a glorified chat system so far. The collaborative nature isn’t even that of GDocs yet because you can’t even edit others’ text. Not sure what I want to do with it (I can’t even drop in an image or edit a doc there… which sucks!). Together we will both figure it out eventually.

By: Cole

Cole — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:25:05 +0000

I agree … Wave is not the end of the road, it is where new forms of transportation can be built … or something. All I know is that we’ll see some amazing things happen at some point. We just have to keep playing, building, understanding, and inventing. It’ll be what we all imagine. That is what is exciting to me.

By: Alan Levine aka CogDog

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:01:12 +0000

@Cole You’ve said in more eloquent words exactly what my position is– there is a foundation for a new platform that has yet to even be close to realized. What is getting under my fur is all the frenzy to be saying This is the Next Big Thing.

@Susan As someone left ut of all cliques in school (I joined the non-conformist group) I know what you are saying. I don’t think, however, that is the root of lack of excitement beyond the people who cant be excited cause they are outside the yellow tape (if I can ever find where one gets invites to share, one of them has your name on it). The velvet rope approach seems to me not the best route, but who am I to question the Oracle?

It just seems ridiculously early for people to be declaring the curricular possibility; it would be like in 1992 talking about the curricular potential of the HTTP protocol.

By: Susan Miller-Cochran

Susan Miller-Cochran — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:47:25 +0000

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m wondering if some of the lack of excitement is because there are many of us out there who still have never received invites even though we’re very interested in trying out and talking about new possibilities for instructional technology. I’d sure love to be invited to the party, and I’d be happy to talk about curricular applications (and will probably attend that session at EDUCAUSE), but it’s awfully hard to get excited about a technology that I can’t even get access to and that brings back a bunch of memories of 8th grade clique-ishness that I would rather not revisit.

By: Cole

Cole — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41:20 +0000

I’m still trying to make sense of it myself, Alan. I’m not ready to say it is useless, because what I think it will ultimately prove to be is a platform for other things to emerge. I know this is a huge stretch, but if one stops thinking of the iPhone as a phone and as an application platform you may see where I am headed. From what I can tell we are all just sort of playing with the core functionality of the real time collaboration at the moment. It is when smart people begin to build extensions that can transform it from a hyper connected chat room to things like a real time video analysis tool, or a multi-author story telling space, or anything else that can/should happen in real time with other people participating.

So at the moment I am waiting and seeing — and playing. Its not the game changer until someone stacks the game on top of it. For me it is a framework that could become nearly anything. These are just the thoughts I am working through at the moment … I’m excited to see where it goes from here though.