Google Courseware?

A completely unrelated comment today led me to an interesting speculation: Could you actually run a course using only Google products?

Let's see:

• Google Sites for the course site itself. You can limit the "sharing" so that the site is only viewable to those enrolled, and you could make the students either collaborators (authors and editors of the site) or viewers only. You can also enable comments on each page of the site, so it would be possible to have basic interaction with 'view only' students.
• Google Calendar for a course calendar.
• Blogger for student writing/journals. With comments, this also allows for basic peer review. Blogger blogs can be made viewable by members only.
• Google Docs for collaborative efforts: writing, spreadsheets, and presentations. An additional benefit is that you can see who did what using the history functions.
• A Google Group for discussions.
  
• A Google Docs spreadsheet for a gradebook. (This would have to be private or everyone would know everyone else's grades. You'd probably have to email grade updates, unless you wanted to clone the spreadsheet and make one for each student--that might be reasonable for a very small class.)
  
• A Google Book textbook? That would really depend on your subject. If you could find something, however, Google now has "My Library" with the option to make a "bookshelf" public. It would also be interesting to use Google Books to search your print textbook, even if you couldn't view the whole thing online. With the new Google Book legal settlement maybe some out of print books will become feasible as textbooks.
  
• Google Docs will display any PDF file, and limit viewership, so you could do readings easily enough.
• YouTube for video lectures, tutorials, screencasts, etc. Students could do video projects, too. Like pretty much everything else, you can limit viewing on YouTube. And there's Picasa for still images.
  
• Google Scholar for research. Well, sort of. Scholar can be very frustrating if you don't have access to library subscriptions. Personally, I think I'd probably just use the regular web search and teach some good information evaluation skills, assuming I didn't have library access. Though Scholar does index a lot of repositories with great content.
  
• Since everyone would need a Google Account for this, everyone would have Gmail. Either a contact list or a Google Group would work for announcements.
• Office hours and appointments can be held in GTalk.
  
• I think everything is embeddable in a Google Site using either widgets or links. It might be possible to use iGoogle for a "personal learning platform" for each student, too. That's were students collect links, RSS feeds, videos, images, etc.
  
  
• As an additional benefit, Google does host some amazing archives, too. Google's Life Magazine Image Archive is astonishing. And Google Video hosts a National Archives video collection. Very suitable to educational use. Google Books has articles, now, too. (I think the date listed on that page is the most recent issue, not the only issue, available.)

OK, so that's course site, calendar, writing/journaling, peer review, discussions, collaborative projects, gradebook, video lectures and projects, images & diagrams, textbooks & readings, announcements, email, chat, and educational & research materials (via archives & search).

What else do we need? (Let's avoid the issues of the advantages of having everything in one place, and whether or not we want Google to have our course content and student records.) In a hypothetical sense, what else do you need to teach a course?

And is anyone game?

Thoughts on the fragility of digital systems

I, like some 17,000 other Elgg/Eduspaces users, got an email this weekend announcing the closing of the Eduspaces service. I'm sure that a fairly large number of them thought, also like me, "What's Eduspaces?"

Eduspaces, as it turns out, is/was the free host for the Elgg open source "social platform". I do remember signing up for an Elgg account a couple of years ago (a class, a workshop?), but I didn't remember the Eduspaces name. There are blogs, file storage, discussion areas, etc., in the Elgg system, and it will still be available for those who want to install it on their own servers. Just the hosted implementation at Eduspaces.net is going away.

Luckily for me, I had signed up and never used the account. I have no content to worry about in Eduspaces, but that certainly isn't true elsewhere. I have blogs, pictures, documents, video, audio, and combinations of things up all over the Internet. I have enough accounts with services that I've tested out that I've had to implement a system for keeping track of them. (I'm using the "private" setting on ClaimID.com to keep links and usernames/emails for services as I sign up for them. Of course, it doesn't do me any good for those things I've already forgotten about!)

Migrating content is something that everyone who uses any sort of digital system should be aware of. When you sign up for a content tool on the web, whether it be a photo storage site or a blog or a discussion group, you should ask if you can export your content in a reasonable manner (and printing pages and pages of content should not be considered a reasonable manner). When I started a project on Zoho Notebook recently, I was happy to discover that the content can be exported as a web page.

It's not just a Web 2.0 problem, though the fragility of the business models for many of these projects makes it more obvious. SCSU is about to lose access to the previous version of our WebCT system, so those with old courses need to migrate their content NOW! (Faculty: contact Stan Walonoski right away if there is old course material that you want back; students: contact your instructor.)

On a different note, I was recently having a discussion with someone who wrote a thesis quite a while ago (in computer eras, anyway). He doesn't have a print copy, and is having trouble reading the floppy disks. First problem--when was the last time you saw a computer with a 5 1/4 inch drive? Second problem--what version of Word Perfect is this? Third problem--are the files still good? (He's found someone for problem one, has some leads for problem two, and is now waiting for the results on problem 3.) I've got dozens of disks (3 1/2 inch, mostly) with files that I wanted to save back when, but most of them aren't readable now, either because I don't have the software or because the files have gotten corrupted over the years. Online storage would help the hardware problem (even 3 1/2 drives are getting scarce), but not the file format problem.

As we document our educations, our careers, and our lives increasingly online, we need to think about the fragility of digital systems. Do you backup? Do you save important "artifacts" in multiple formats? (A .txt file is a .txt file and probably will be for a very long time, thank goodness.) Do you check if your online accounts have mass export features? Do you keep track of what's where, or, like me, do you have bits and pieces scattered around from whatever was new and interesting at the time?

And please deposit a print copy of your thesis with your library.