Geeky title, but bear with me…
I read a post last week that did a great job summarizing the ways we collaborate on things today that were radically different even a few short years ago.
How do you Collaborate? via TeachingHacks
It really got me to thinking about the things I do in my job and/or personal life that just didn’t exist a few years ago.
Today I find myself away from my desk working remotely at a school building. What did I need to get set up in the different work environment?
- A web connection.
- umm… there is no #2
Did I bring other stuff? Sure – my laptop and a projector. Did I NEED them to do my work? Not today – and less and less all the time.
So what are the magical tools that I live my life in and around?
- Email: I use Thunderbird, which admittedly is desktop based, but all of my work and personal accounts are left on the servers so I can access them via the web.
- RSS: I use NetNewsWire as my feed aggregator. Again, this is a desktop based tool, but I have a pro account that syncs with NewsGator, so I can login and get the same folders and feeds and read/not read states online.
- Calendar: We use a shared online calendar system from Sun. It is a pretty hardy tool. It doesn’t do the fancy interface things that make me so happy to use Google’s Calendar for my personal stuff, and I’d like it to be more open with subscriptions and exports, but it gets the job done.
- Word Processing/Spreadsheets: Increasingly I am using Google Docs & Spreadsheets instead of MS Word. In fact, I’d say 3/5 of the time these days. Not a fan of the Google? There are 101 alternatives. I can make you one promise – the first time you open a document in a meeting and take notes collectively, you’ll be a believer in social software.
- Bookmarks: I saw an article the other day about the top 20 social bookmarking services out there today. I had no idea there were so many, I’d only heard of 7 or 8 of them. I use Del.icio.us.
- Chat: I have an AIM account, a Yahoo! account and a GTalk account all being managed through Adium. If my laptop were gone, I could still login to these services online through AIM Express or the Google Talk Widget, though it would be clumsy.
- Content Management: My school district is in the initial stages of migrating to a CMS called DocuShare. It has a Windows XP client, but it is primarily targeted at its web interface. I have been using it for a year now and really rely upon it. It is a very powerful system and I am looking forward to getting as many people on board as possible in the next year. Like most online tools, its strength will be in its community.
- Help Tickets: Part of my job is helping people who are having computer trouble. LPS uses LiveTime as its online ticketing solution. I don’t get excited when it is time to use it, but it is a pretty well developed application from what I can tell.
- Course Management: Most of what I do is training. Training logistics are managed here through a piece of software called CourseWhere. It was used at my last school district as well. I have strong opinions about it that I will not share here, but it is all done online, and that is a positive thing. Now I need to work on being part of the solution for migrating the CONTENT of trainings online.
- Adobe CS3 Suite: For pure unbridled power, there is no free or online solution that matches the power of the apps Adobe is selling. BUT, there are apps that will do most of the basics for free on your desktop (Gimp, Inkscape, etc). And there are more and more that will do the very basics online, like Picnik & Phixr.
- Presentations: For now I am still using Apple’s Keynote. But it is a pretty poorly kept secret that Google is adding Presentations to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets suite in the near future. You can believe I will reevaluate the situation when that happens. I have been keeping an eye on SlideShare, SlideRoll or others like them. I may start using them to share presentations in the future.
- Photo Management: After email this was my first total immersion in web based applications. I have been a power user of Flickr for almost 2 years. (Interestingly, what the public sees is less than half of what I use it for.) I have also started using Picasa in the past few months, mostly as a utility.
-
Video: To access the processing power of my computer I do all of my video editing on my desktop. (In the past with iMovie but increasingly with Final Cut Studio apps.) I have seen a few places where you can edit video online, but I have not tried them. However, once I am done editing videos, I am posting them online almost immediately. I have stayed away from the YouTube & Google Video stuff. At work I host my training videos and such on our content management system – DocuShare. At home, they go directly to Brightcove.
- Web Content: We have one of the finest web developers in all of the land working for us here at LPS. One of the things he has done is create (from scratch) a web content management tool for us to use in creating content for the LPS website. It is all online, of course.
I just looked through my bookmarks and saw 15-20 more online sites and utilities that I use here and there. I am not going to bore anyone with the details, this list was long enough as it is and it was just covering the staples in my daily work. How many of these tools even existed in a usable state 5 years ago?
I am sure it will be hilarious to go back in 10 years and look at this list. Maybe 5. (Maybe 2?)
