As you an see, I’m running a bit behind on these things, so the posts will come fast and furious.
Being a complete tool for Google, I’ve been familiar with Google Docs for quite some time. During my time at grad school, it was particularly useful for those of us who had to work in small group projects and lived hundreds of miles away from each other – Emporia State’s SLIM program was (is) a mostly online one, so I would routinely be dealing with folks from western Kansas, Nebraska, and even further beyond. We all had a central school website we would use to connect, of course, but if we were gearing up for presentations or any sort of collaborative project – well, pretty much everyone had a Google account, so it was an easy and convienent way to stay connected.
Post school and into the library world, one of the things I’ve taken an interest in is professional associations such as KLA. The idea of we small tribe of librarians, in our communities scattered across the state, toiling away for the commonweal – staying connected is absolutely essential, since it’s too easy to stay in our holes and ignore the world around us. Cloud computing is a way to facilitate those connections, keeping people linked despite the obstacles of distance and time and budgetary restraints.
Of course, none of this explains the indifference from the world to the appearance of Google Wave, but that’s for another week.
