Amidst much geeky fanfare Google recently unveiled its latest, greatest innovation – Google Wave. Without going into gory detail, and admitting freely that I’ve only gotten about two thirds of the way through the one-hour-twenty presentation video (but being otherwise filled in over dinner last night about the whole thing thanks to uber-geek Spud), Google Wave morphs instant messaging, email, document collaboration and a bunch of other tools into one more or less seamless platform, that just happens to be open source as well and lend itself brilliantly to integration with other applications thanks to a rich API. In theory anyway.
So what impact could this have on Moodle?
It is worth mentioning that Google and Moodle have already rubbed noses thanks to the Google Apps integration released earlier this year, so keeping an open eye and an open mind on the potential for further integration seems almost a given.
Although the demonstration of Google Wave was only an early Alpha demo, it still showed situations where it could either be a significant threat to some of the functionality Moodle (and in fact every other LMS), or it could be the perfect enhancement to Moodle’s existing capabilities.
Several areas stand out as potential integration points. Consider Moodle’s current collaboration tools, which include Discussion Forums as the primary collaboration tool, a fairly rudimentary (although scheduled for replacement) wiki tool, basic chat room functionality and messaging (either within Moodle or forwarded to the user’s email address). Now consider an environment where some of these relatively basic functions were augmented (via Moodle SSO at the very least) with the potentially real-time and most definitely process redefining features offered by Wave, and all of a sudden some of the limitations of Moodle that have already been partially overcome by the Google Apps integration go one step further – and it could be one massive step. When you start to contemplate how the API features of Wave could also be integrated into assessment processes (i.e. pushing a Wave into a group assignment drop-box) or into the Mahara ePortfolio system (pushing or pulling content between a Wave and an individual’s eProtfolio) then all of a sudden the current silos of information we deal with every day finally start to show some signs of disappearing.
Of course the age-old argument of using Web2.0 technologies as part of the formal learning and assessment process (security, availability, IP ownership and so on) will no doubt surface, but the publishing of Wave as a protocol as well as a platform and thus allowing organisations, universities, whoever, to run their own segregated Wave environment on their own servers, takes this yet another step beyond many of the current crop of Web2.0 tools used by Educators (and often hated by local IT Admins).
Grab a cuppa, say goodbye to 80 minutes of your life, and catch the Wave
Cloud talk? Maybe. A complete re-think of how we operate in a world driven by Outlook and Word that could change the whole game forever, with education being no exception? Hell yes. Can’t wait to play with it.