Online Collaboration (wow, gen-XO is coming)

A really AJAX-talented friend of mine is working at Google Docs now, and I’ve been waiting to see what they do next. I finally dug into Presentations last night, the slide-show solution, and I was surprised by three things:

• It’s got themes that are really quite pretty (from Google?! lol)
• There’s a chat window for viewers during presentations
• But, there’s no way link to a specific page within the deck (http:// …/slide2)

Overall, it’s quite handy and I think I’ll use it. (sample)

Thinking of online collaboration, two other sites I’ve been playing with that are similar experiences / values:

• Pagii – create wacky, instant web pages that are addressable and more graphically rich than anything else I’ve seen out there.
• ScribeLink – a friend just sent it to me this morning, but I’ve already been collaborating with my 7^th-grader step-daughter on a drawing (school’s out today, she’s in the other room watching Tivo, laptop open, listening to music on YouTube and playing games at Build-A-Bear…)

Here’s a list of 60 other tools at Mashable.

Thinking about how to present info online & collaborate on it… online collaboration is sure getting close to great. At work I’m currently blogging project-stuff on a WordPress installation (internal server), using a Wiki (which has an image-tool for screen shots), and uploading Office docs to a SharePoint installation (gets us version control). It’s wacky, but all the needs are met. I link back and forth across the 3 platforms and it works great.

Well, it’s getting easier and easier to imagine solving all these needs even better just using the publicly-available and free tools. My conversations with teachers lately confirm they're sliding slowly this direction as well – evolving from handing in a paper, to emailing it, to uploading it, to just doing it in Google Docs. And, facilitating thoughtful class dialogues with blogging I mentioned before.

What’s next? Consider: digital projectors for slide shows are expensive, but everyone sitting in the computer lab and watching the presentation on Google Docs (and chatting silently in the chat box while the presenter talks) is a solution sans projector. Wacky.

And there it is again – thoughts of the XO generation, the millions of kids who will be exploring these tools in a matter of weeks...