UW Technology for Students
Soon there will be a brainstorm meeting at work to come up with ideas for a project that is based around the needs of UW students. There has been a lot of talk about collaborative software and other various group work tools, but we’re looking for more suggestions.
Some general ideas that come to mind are:
- collaborative writing
- homepage portal building tool (sorta like bloglines but customized to class info, eposts, etc…)
- project management software
- Notes/files/document sharing
Any other ideas (big or small) that you can think of? What technology/tools do you wish the school offered that would make your life easier?
May 18th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
Well, I think those 4 seem to hit a good majority of what I can think of. But, the dealbreaker isn’t that the school offers them, but that they are easy to use for all students. Like, ePost is great, but it is so featureless that it can be a pain to use. Now, I think that WebQ 3.0 is a step in the right direction, but you could develop the bestest project management system for students and if it was hard to use it just wouldn’t get used. But, I don’t doubt that it will be this way with you on the job, right?
Anyways, I think the project management software is pretty all emcompassing of the 3 others that you listed. Because it could handle document sharing, and you could make a portal as a part of it and then you could have it support collaborative writing. But, what would be cool is if you developed all of these tools, separately, and then have a way to tie them together, that would be powerful. Really powerful, IMO.
May 18th, 2005 at 10:27 pm
I agree with you about the tying the tools together. That is sort of the idea behind the homepage portal project. I think it would be awesome if class websites and eposts offered RSS, which could then be picked up by the student’s custom homepages.
Anyway it’s just one idea for now. Hopefully some more ideas will come rolling in.
May 18th, 2005 at 10:59 pm
Yeah, anyway that you can syndicate content. Whether it is via RSS, ICS, or even e-mail. It’s about letting people know that something has changed. It’s cliche, but information is power and often, I find, that people just don’t check because they don’t think something changed. Like RSS is perfect, it’s the reason I’m back here commenting on your comment.