Getting schooled by Google+

Mark Dyer
Contributor
Google+ is Facebook’s biggest competition. Despite being invitation-only, it now has over 20 million users. Compared to Facebook’s 750 million users, it will be some time before G+ can reach social networking dominance, if it does at all.

While techies provided the initial enthusiasm thrust, G+ can find success in the market where Facebook was born  —  universities. More importantly, G+ is fully capable of serving universities better than Facebook ever could.
University students are big Facebook users — a quick scan of laptop screens in a lecture hall will tell you that. So why is it shunned as an educational tool, in favour of services like Moodle?
Moodle is a closed system, and content is strictly educational. However, Facebook’s content is open-ended. Facebook’s content flood is shared with all of your ‘friends’ by default. Even more, the social network standard lacks solid distinctions between personal, work, or school content.
This is why many professors and TAs refuse to add their students on Facebook. While happy to answer a few questions on a class’s page, pictures from the Ab’s Halloween Pub Night are unwelcome on their news feed. Facebook’s unrestricted sharing of content inadvertently crosses the boundary of the student-teacher relationship.
With G+’s “Circles” feature, users are encouraged to group contacts according to association. Posted content can be controlled; only certain individuals or circles can view it. This means pictures of your cat and questions for your tutorial group can exist on the same social network without coming into conflict.
Professors are already excited about G+ as an educational tool. Brad King, a journalism professor at Indiana’s Ball State University, is particularly enthusiastic.
“When the new school year starts, I’ll form circles for each of my classes,” he wrote on his blog.
King plans to use G+ to post assignments and articles that his students can reference. Also, thanks to its archiving feature, conversations within his class circles can be saved and permalinked so his students can access them at any time.
King stresses that students want one place to go to for all their class information: “sending them out to find what you’re teaching is bad form.” At York, web content is dispersed across Moodle, Blackboard (formerly WebCT), Wikispaces and professors’ blogs. G+ harmonizes all the services of the aforementioned but still acts as a personal social networking platform.
If Google+ becomes the standard, students will have only one place to go. Not just for class information, but for everything.
Google+ will change office hours as well. This fall, Jeremy Littau from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University will hold hours on G+’s video conferencing feature “Hangouts”. Hangouts allows for up to 10 people to video chat at once. The person speaking the loudest is given the main window, while the spectators are shown in smaller windows underneath. This makes Hangouts ideal for tutorial instruction.
“Sometimes I go over the same stuff with multiple students in multiple meetings; this could streamline that process,” writes Littau.
A YouTube feature on Hangouts allows for synced video streaming. Littau teaches a multimedia class and sees the immediate educational benefits of this feature.
“I can initiate a Hangout with a student in my multimedia classes, watch one of the videos they make, and then go over it with them,” he wrote. “Real time feedback similar to a paper conference.”
Recently, Google added a feature to its share button on YouTube, allowing for Hangouts video sharing directly from YouTube. This also applies to YouTube Live, their live streaming service. Hangouts can now go beyond video critique. Live lectures, debates, performances and conferences are all at the disposal of educators as teaching material.
Of course, G+ is not just a handy tool for profs and TAs. It offers benefits for students. Keeping school and personal life separate, but on the same social network, is a boon. Also, York’s large commuter population and Scott Library’s volume problem makes Hangouts a welcome space for study groups.
If rumours are true and Google Docs integration into Google+ is on the way, then G+ will become the most convenient way to share, edit and critique documents, presentations and spreadsheets.
G+ is fully capable of becoming the standard social network for universities. Whether it will or not remains to be seen. Enthusiasts should remember it took three years for users to figure out what Twitter was for, let alone to see validity in it. It may be some time before universities catch on to Google+ but for now, school’s still out.