Aaron Carpenter's blog

Last week we undertook the negative side of the argument whether or not Google and the Internet are making us stupid, as based off the article by Nicholas Carr that ran in the Atlantic Monthly in 2008.

I was thankfully on the team that got to argue in favor of the Internet, which was the easier position to take. It’s hard to play devil’s advocate and argue against one’s own educational foundation. I found this project to be challenging for a number of reasons, but the biggest of all was the collaboration aspect. I’ll be honest, it’s hard enough to complete projects face-to-face and there were added difficulties with everyone working remotely.

Part of the issue was simply basic communication. When you don’t see group members on a regular basis (which is not possible with E-Learning) there is no easy way to talk about the issues at hand or drop a simple reminder. There is also the fear that sent emails might be rejected and the message wouldn’t get through. It’s a lot harder to be productive when an answer is needed right now.

Thankfully, we found a system that worked most of the time. Through a combination of GoogleDocs, email, and Skype we managed to keep in touch. GoogleDocs proved temperamental though. It was not as seamless as I had hoped when it came to getting others access to the materials. Near the end I also had issues with using Google’s Chrome web browser with GoogleDocs and even I didn’t have access to it and had to revert to Firefox.

Overall though working in the cloud was a positive experience. It was great to have the peace of mind that materials were backed up in multiple locations on different machines and we all had the ability to access and edit.