Monday 29 August 2011

Thing 13 - Google Docs, Wikis and Dropbox

As I mentioned in my last blog, I have been looking forward to trying out the tools in Thing 13 (not so unlucky).

Google Docs & Dropbox - I have no experience of using either of these in a work, educational or personal context, but, having read up about them, can see the great potential. I've owned & used many USB sticks for work & personal use, & thankfully have never (touches wood here) had disasters with losing one. The concept of cloud computing does seem appealing & I suppose one has to weigh up for oneself the pros & cons of online security of information versus the risk of something like a USB device going astray. It is, however, the potential for collaboration which I find appealing & has made me want to try one of these tools out.
 Currently, I cannot think of a place for using either of them in my paid or voluntary work (health service & primary school respectively). However, as a member of a local natural science society, I am currently involved in helping to catalogue their museum's collections. I have jointly taken responsibility with one other person for cataloguing a specific part of the collection & we are storing the access database on a USB stick. As we do not always attend the society at the same time, this relies on us remembering to leave the stick for the other to use! I am now quite keen to discuss the use of a collaborative tool for our sharing of this task. I know that Dropbox has limitations in terms of free storage capacity & the potential for deletion of files after lengthy inactivity, but the ability to download, work offline & then upload is appealing. Also, I wonder how Google Docs would work with formatting an Access document?

Wikis - I have no experience of creating or collaborating on a Wiki. I do use Wikipedia as a kind of quick-fix reference tool when I want to look up something/someone quickly that I know nothing about in order to get a general idea. The other wiki which I recently looked at was for libcampuk11 . Maybe I could take my first steps in contributing to a wiki by adding a cake suggestion to the cakecamp section!

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