Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For? There seem to be three forces at play when it comes to education and social media.
The first is a lack of force, quite frankly - the inertia that makes many educators unwilling and uninterested in integrating the technology into their classrooms. The second is the force of fear - the pressures on the part of administrators, district officials, and politicians to curtail and ban teacher and students' interactions online. (See Rhode Island's recently passed legislation that outlaws all social media on school grounds as a case in point.) And finally, the third force is that of more and more educators who are embracing social media and advocating its use on- and off-campus - for student learning and for teacher professional development alike. I spent this past week with many of those teachers at the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Philadelphia, and when Google unveiled Google+ on Tuesday, most of us were otherwise preoccupied.
Plus Potentials for Schools. What Google+ adds to news. To paraphrase Mark Zuckerberg, it is too soon to know what Google+ is.
But I’ve been trying to imagine how it will and won’t be useful to news. You should add rock salt to anything I say, as I thought Google Wave would be an important journalistic tool. With that in mind, a few opening thoughts: * Google+ likely won’t be good for live coverage of breaking events because its algorithm messes with the reverse chronology, promoting old posts when they get new comments. It doesn’t favor the *latest* the way Twitter and liveblogging do and live news is all about the latest.
(I’ve wished that I could have the option to get a stream only of newly submitted posts. . * G+ should be good for collaboration on reporting. . * If Google gets its synergistic act together and incorporates Google Docs — and some of the tricks from Wave — into G+, then this could be a very good collaboration tool for communities to gather together and share what they know. . * G+ will be good for promoting content. Google+, Businesses and Beyond Developer API for Google+: It's coming. Google's new social network, Google+, has only been public for two days, and developers are already interested in access to the service so they can roll out add-ons and improvements.
Fortunately for them, and ultimately for Google+ users, developer access is coming. It's simply a matter of time. As Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social for Google, told me at a Web 2.0 Summit cocktail party tonight, "I'm a developer guy at the core. It is inconceivable I would build something without a platform. " Gundotra worked for 15 years at Microsoft before leaving for Google. Related links A hands-on look at Google+, using Google+ How to invite your pals to Google+ right now Google+: It's friending, with benefits (images) Google resets social agenda with Google+ How to look inside Google+ without an invite But it's not surprising that Google+ launched without developer access. "We're just getting started! "