a former student (Will Elias) was kind enough to invite me to Google Plus - the only way you can join it at the moment (Google's way of generating buzz). Google+ is Google's answer to Facebook.
It's in the early phases of development but there are a couple of neat things I see so far:
- the ability to interconnect the Google Apps with the social media. I'm a big fan of Google Apps so I'm curious to see how this develops
- the ability to more effectively partition out what news/information goes to what group of people in your "friends" list. Of course, one of the first things that stands out is that Google does away with "friends" and replaces it with your "circles" which is a big plus over Facebook. So now, every posting you have gets connected to a particular circle of people that you've defined as friends, acquantances, people you follow, etc. (it's more than just a wording thing). So now students can post comments from the outing with their friends the night before and not worry about their profs seeing it! Seriously though, what intrigues me about this feature is that now you might just build up a ton of contacts of people that you know in any capacity, but you can easily partition out how you interact with them in this media. For example, I was thinking that now I would consider asking students to connect with me through this since I could add them to a, say, "bio321 circle" which would not get personal information posted there.
- G+ also has a way to interconnect with people via video/IM in a controlled manner through what they call their "hangout rooms". Technically I could start a hangout room that was only available to Bio321 students so they could drop in if they wanted. This might be useful for virtual office hours or even for teaching in the event of sickness. One thing I didn't see is a way to show a Google Presentation in there (Google's equiv. of powerpoint) which would make it even cooler for teaching potential, but I did email that suggestion into Google.
Should be interesting to see this develop. There's enough backing with Google Apps here at Elon that it wouldn't be a hard transition for most of the students, although I'm not sure that will be the case nationwide since Facebook is pretty entrenched. Still, it's hard to not like the interconnectivity of G+ with Google Apps - sort of like the allure of the Mac system applications
If anyone in the department is interested in playing around with it let me know - once you get invited it lets you invite 50 other people, so I can pass that on to you.
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