so i taught a 2-week long graduate class the last 2 weeks of June. each day was long and i am not sure that this is the best learning environment for the students in this class . . . on the other hand, stuff we worked on during our first day was still fairly fresh in student’s thinking as they approached content on the last day. but i digress already.
this was a face-to-face class, but i ran it completely paperless. many papers were due, but everything was submitted via Google Docs. my university is switching all student email to Gmail accounts any day now, so my take on this is that there is somewhat of an expectation to use Google tools. once you have a Gmail account, then the other tools that Google offers are easy to sign into using your Gmail login. one thing i like to do is keep student logins to a minimum. our blogging activities were using Blogger.com (owned by Google); our documents were submitted via Google Docs; and i even quickly showed students how to use Google Bookmarks — a tool that can be placed in the navigation toolbar of your browser to quickly bookmark pages being visited so that they can be viewed on any other computer once you log into your Google account. and, my students started following some ed tech blogs so i showed them Google Reader — to follow blog feeds more easily. finally, all assignments and topics covered were placed in Google Calendars. someone even joked that Google should be paying me.
of course, that kind of comment struck a chord with me. should i be pushing Google products? here i am a guy who only uses open source tools when i teach online classes and suddenly i am using and promoting Google tools. they’re free, but Google is certainly not open source. Google is a for-profit company that places ads in the Gmail messages and Google sells advertising in various forms to place before our eyes when using their products. their products are free, but they aren’t really free from commercialization and consumerism, etc.
on the other hand, the vast majority of my colleagues have students use Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and even Excel. Microsoft Office costs a pretty penny and every student who attends our university has paid a bit of their tuition to ensure that Office is installed on every single campus computer. it’s no small expense by any stretch. are my colleagues on the Microsoft payroll? of course not. we tend to use the tools that are available and easy to use. Microsoft tools are pretty much the standard. in that sense, at least the Google tools can be used on each home computer as long as the computer is connected the internet (and even offline once you get going). not everyone has Microsoft tools available. i know i often get odd file extensions each semester from these students. just because MS Word is the standard, is it right to expect students to have it at home as well? i think not. and yes, there are Open Office and other solutions, but most people don’t know about these options.
i don’t feel guilty using Google products. my criterion for any tool i use in my teaching has always been that it must be freely available to my students in their own classrooms or future classrooms. so, open source tools are a natural way to ensure the product is available to anyone. this means i don’t even like using Blackboard when i don’t have to use it. most teachers don’t have access to Blackboard in their own classrooms so why would i promote a tool that they cannot use in their own teaching? instead, i use Drupal, phpBB, Moodle or something along these lines. open source and free. well, Google tools are free as well even if they aren’t open source, so in that sense the Google tools still meet my inclusion parameters. until better online tools come along that are also free i think i’ll stick with the Google tools that work for me.