#CUNYSPS 7: Collaborative Cloud Editing With Google Docs

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no denying the prevalence of group assignments in higher education. As someone who always enjoyed the collaborative nature of group assignments back when I was in school, I actually find myself a little envious of all the free and web based tools that are available to students today.

Google documents is an online software suite similar to that old standby, Microsoft Office. There’s a document editor similar to Word, you can create and manipulate spreadsheets much like Excel, design and play slide shows like Powerpoint, and much more.

Google Docs is available for free to anyone with a Google account, and is compatible with any files from Microsoft Office. But the best thing about these applications, is that you can share these documents with classmates and colleagues allowing them to view and edit the work you’ve done. This allows for a more seamless collaborative experience and saves a lot of time and frustration. If someone in your group isn’t pulling their weight, you will know before your group gets together and meets, and you can address issues like that earlier.

This video provides a brief and fun look at all that Google Docs has to offer:

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of cloud computing, it’s simply a term used to describe documents that don’t live on your hard drive. This frees you from concerns of losing them do to system crashes, and makes it that much easier to share and collaborate.

Shawn Abraham is SPS’ Virtual Campus Manager, which means he gets to have a lot of fun building an online community for the school.  He also has a lot of fun reading books about zombies.  These two things rarely intersect.

#CUNYSPS 5: Have You Googled Yourself Lately?

When you want information on something, it’s likely that one of the first ways you go about seeking it out is through a quick Google search.  It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s comprehensive.  But have you ever googled yourself?  Because if you’re not, and consequently you’re not doing whatever you can to manage those search results, you’re putting yourself at a severe disadvantage.

Taking control of your search results is a key part of managing your personal brand online.  It allows you to control (to a certain extent) what people see when they search for you.  This is something that can be very important if you’re looking for a new job.  And even if you’re happy with your current employment situation, it’s never a bad idea to try and manage what people see when your name comes up.

The first time I googled myself, I found out I was  on the FBI’s most wanted list, that I thought my University was doing a great job of bring events to campus thanks to a quote in the student news paper, and that I was a hip hop artist.  Only one of those actually pertained to me (my ranking FBI most wanted list, naturally), so I went to work figuring out how to make the search results actually reflect me and my online presence.  It’s not an overnight process, and you’re competing with a lot of other people with the same name, but it’s an important process nonetheless.

Now there’s my website, my social networking profiles, a blog I wrote when I was living in China, and then, below all of that, some results for other Shawn Abrahams.  I did my best to make sure that my content was the first thing you’d see when you search my name, and people seeking information about me can see the information that I want them to see right at the top.

Naturally, the more common name you have, the more difficult it is to guarantee that you show up on top.  Here are three quick tips to keep in mind if you want to take control of your digital destiny.

1. In case you haven’t heard it from me enough, social networking is kind of a big deal.  Google and other major search engines have a tendency of floating Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles to the top.  So make sure you register a vanity address for your account wherever possible.

2. If you haven’t done it yet, if someone ELSE hasn’t done it yet, register http://www.yourname.com.  Even if you don’t know what to do with it, you’ll find a use for it eventually.

3. Time to start that blog about cross stitching vintage 80′s pop art that you’ve always been talking about.  Blogs are a great way to up your relevance in searches.  Your name comes up a lot, and it helps define you as an expert in something.  This can be a key component of your personal brand, especially if that brand is 80′s Pop Art Cross Stitching Expert.

The idea of developing your brand online will be central to this column moving forward.  Now that the semester is in full swing, we’ll be going bi-weekly, but the next installment will pay closer attention to the idea and importance of starting your own blog.

Shawn Abraham is SPS’ Virtual Campus Manager, which means he gets to have a lot of fun building an online community for the school.  He also has a lot of fun reading books about zombies.  These two things rarely intersect.

#CUNYSPS 4: “We Are the Nation… of Google and Facebook”

Aside from the expected non-stop wave of stops and applause, there was one line from the State of the Union address delivered last night by President Obama that stuck with me.

“None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do – what America does better than anyone – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living.”

- President Barack Obama, The State of the Union, 1/25/11

The technological revolution we are going through is being spoken of in the same context as Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers.  It is just further proof that the advances in online interactivity are something profoundly significant.  That the President choose to highlight these corporate powerhouses, both still in their relative infancy, as the new vanguards of the American economy and American ingenuity is worthy of a moment of discussion.

If our chief export is to be defined as innovation and ingenuity, it is impossible to avoid certain concerns.  We’re not talking about easily quantifiable products that will boost company revenues because we’re shipping more units and earning more money.  But the success stories of Facebook and Google are to be lauded because they are highlighting a new sort of social export that proves that America still has a lot to offer to the world, and will remain relevant and powerful on a global level thanks to sites that quite frankly, many people cannot live without.

We all love their products and can clearly point to a point in our lives before and after we began using them.  I’d wager that most folks would say that their lives have been improved (either subtly or significantly) thanks to either Facebook or Google.  But the truth is that one of the key selling points to both Google and Facebook is that they are both free.  Would you use either if they started charging?  Before you answer, seriously think about it.  Of course it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction of mock disgust and dismay.  Pay?  For Facebook?  For Google?  Absurd.

But is it, really?  Think of the ease of information afforded to you by Google, and the convenience of contact that Facebook cultivates.  How much is that worth to you?  Something tells me it’s more than the whopping zero dollars we’re all paying right now.

I’m going to shift gears away from these hypotheticals, because luckily for us all, it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing either site behind a pay wall in our lifetime.  If ever.  In fact, there have been so many nonsensical “news” stories claiming that Facebook will start charging, that the site recently changed their login page to reflect them:

Notice the pledge on the right hand side above the sign up fields that the site will always be free.  They needed to put that out there right in front to supersede all the bogus claims of turning into a paysite.  But those claims are based in the reality that, Facebook is probably indispensable to a large enough percentage of their user base that people would find themselves willing to pay.

But we won’t have to, and that’s a good thing.  The American economy is on its way to righting itself, and the future is looking bright.  We have companies innovating on a scale so massive that it is changing the way the world interacts and learns more than anything since the telephone.  State of the Unions are always a time for Presidents to put a positive spin on things, even if the situation is particularly dire.  But for once, I’m inclined to agree.  Things are changing for the better, and thanks to innovations by Facebook, Google, Apple, and companies we haven’t even heard of yet, they’re changing at a rapid rate that all but guarantees an exciting and unpredictable future.

Shawn Abraham is SPS’ Virtual Campus Manager, which means he gets to have a lot of fun building an online community for the school.  He also has a lot of fun reading books about zombies.  These two things rarely intersect.