Borg’s Blog

Do you remember those hot summer days at camp? Can you still feel the cold water hitting your skin as you dove head first into the lake? Do you remember your swimming counselor’s cardinal rule? Yes, stay with your buddy.

Every year thousands of freshman dive into the cold waters of higher education. It feels good. They are beginning to experience new degrees of freedom but far too often they miss the fact they also have new degrees of responsibility. Mom and Dad aren’t there to check on their homework so they have to learn to manage their own time. Unfortunately many fail.

I think creating an academic buddy system may be a productive way to reinforce positive behaviors in college and better prepare students for a modern world of work. I personally cannot create a buddy system for the entire freshman experience but I can do so for my general education class. Success can be assessed by analyzing student comments about their impressions of the buddy system.

My general education course introduces freshman to the use of Microsoft Office and the Modern Language Association’s style guide. The course goals are to equip them with the software skills necessary for success as undergraduate students. Focus is placed on Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The skills are important but Microsoft offers weak support for collaborative activity. What is really needed is something that enables students to closely collaborate with their buddies. Google docs offers an interesting alternative.

Google is all about collaboration. It provides a free email system called Gmail which serves as a jump off point to a variety of digital activities. Gmail can gather email from multiple accounts in one place so my students ought to be able to receive email from their college accounts there. It provides a convenient calendar to support time management and students can personalize their home pages with graphic themes and RSS feeds to their favorite blogs. These home pages provide a direct link to Google docs.

The key concept of Google docs is to provide a virtual work space where collaborators can work on word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in real time without regard of space or time. Files are stored on Google’s servers so they can be accessed anywhere you find a computer connected to the World Wide Web. Files are secure because access is password protected and routine backups are performed. Google docs are Microsoft compatible too!

Is Google docs an appropriate software suite to teach? Many major corporations and research universities have turned to Google docs over Microsoft Office because of the advantages it offers so it is a viable alternative. The skills learned in my course are word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation graphics. These skills are universal amongst alternative productivity software suites so there isn’t an issue of drastically changing the content of the course. The strategic advantage is offers is its rich support of collaborative activity.

I’ve visited with a few of my peers about this and they said “Go for it!” so I am diving in head first with Google as my buddy. Keep tuned in to see how it goes.