New tools…new knowledge?

EduTechie recently posted an announcement regarding a seminar by Google Tutor about tools for collaboration, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and in the post Jeff Van Drimmelen (EduTechie) provided illustration of a product to which he contributed during a seminar some time ago: a collectively prepared and written seminar paper.

This illustration is particularly interesting as a source of inspiration in suggesting / showing how scholarship utilizing tools within a networked space can facilitate something as classic and conventional as a seminar paper. The post at the same time makes one wonder how the process went and what problems were encountered (e.g., was the process more efficient, were there some things that couldn't be done online and had to be arranged face-to-face, what was the blend between online and face-to-face meetings). Nor do we know how use of these tools by Google measures up to other collaborative tools and procedures; nor do we know what organizational prerequisites were required to 'make this work'. Finally, we really don't know whether such a mode of conducting scholarship results in anything more or better than would have been achieved using the age-old procedures and tools of scholarship.

I would not expect such a post to consider matters like the above, and I continue to intuitively feel that the **potential** for new knowledge and insight to be enhanced through the availability of these tools (e.g., a word process provides more possibility than a typewriter, which provides more than pen and pencil, which provides more than quilt and parchment). Still, in all of our excitement for newness we probably should remember the critical ingredient necessary for any quality scholarship: individual insight. What seems to happen with such tools is that such insight can be multiplied many fold….

Here is the EduTechie post:

Real Time Collaboration

January 24th, 2008 by Jeff VanDrimmelen

GoogleTutor posted a nice reminder tutorial online today about the power of real-time collaboration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  This past semester a class I was taking wrote a nice paper as a whole class and used Google Docs for gathering everything together between us all.  Nice.