Brown University switched students to Google Apps for education a little over a year a ago, and recently completed a similar transition for faculty and staff.  In the interviews with CIO Michael Pickett one primary reason for the switch is requests from staff for collaboration tools, and a common platform with students.  In traditional education structures there often are silos for student systems and business systems.  Why the artificial divide? And who made the initial decision?  According to Pickett student behavior led the charge.  The majority of students were already using Gmail – what better way to ‘listen’ to users than to observe their behavior and be guided by those choices.  Another shift from traditional IT top-down decision making.  And integrated video chat? No more schlepping cross-campus for F2F meetings?  Sign me up!

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I attended a day-long workshop yesterday on Google analytics, run by LunaMetrics. For those of you who may not know, Google analytics is one of their free services that let’s web site owners gather website visitor statistics which can be used to provide more effective sites.  It was a great workshop, and I’ll be incorporating the ideas into some web-application re-writing I have planned for the summer. 

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Alright, I know this post may make me sound like I’m arriving late to the Google Docs party So fine, I can take it.  And I’ll admit that I haven’t had any real opportunities to use Google docs for shared document creation.  But in a recent workshop I was part of a team where we had a lot of collaborating to do in very little time — and we used Google docs as our collaboration platform.  It was simple, easy to set up, and worked REALLY well.  The coolest thing was that we all had the document visible on our computers and could watch the edits unfold as each person took turns on it.  No need to refresh the screens — no need to hand off the editing.  In fact the document showed who was actively editing which section.  It was easy, dynamic, and a crucial resource to support our collaborations.

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Can’t cut the fat-client dependence (i.e. Microsoft Word) but want the collaborative flexibility offered by Google Docs?  OffSync is worth a look.

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It is a tough time for the University IT department.  Just at a time when we’d like to take more control — to prevent virus/worm infiltrations, loss of sensitive information (ss# or credit cards) or movement of company assets to off-site companies (google docs) — our users are moving in the opposite direction.  And expecting us to follow along or get left behind.  Our students would rather discuss class homework on Facebook, not in the course website, and faculty are following.  Departments expect cutting edge web-based services with the same feature set as offerred by Google and many others — tough to compete with when offerred for free.  If we ignore their requests, charge too much, or take too long, they’ll just do it anyway.

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