Is it a platform? A learning space? A course management system? No it's Groove. Courtesy of groove.net. Their own publicity describes Groove as "an interactive environment for flexible small-group collaboration." Groove is exactly what's been waiting to happen for a while now. Think of all the communication tools that you may need to connect you and your students, and Groove has them all - text and voice mail, instant messaging, text and voice chat, whiteboard, forums, calendar - they are all there. And there's more.
Shared file spaces, picture galleries (where you can upload pix for others to view), the facility to control the browsers of other Groove users in your shared space (you can take people on a tour of websites of your choice) - it is in my opinion the ultimate online teaching tool. In many respects it leaves programs like WebCT and Blackboard in the dust, but to be fair that is comparing apples and oranges. Groove is not a course management system. It has no tracking or built in assessment tools. Its purpose is solely peer to peer communication.
The basic concept of Groove is that of creating shared spaces (which can be thought of as online classrooms). All Groovers can set these up. Then you ask other Groove users to join your space. And there in your own shared space you can customise to your heart's content. You can choose to add predetermined toolsets (Grooves suggests for example what tools you'll need for meetings), or you can just add tools one at a time as you need them. This allows maximum versatility.
For example:
You may want people to be able to view pictures you have loaded and use the whiteboard to reproduce some aspect of the image
Using the shared browser facility you can browse webpages simultaneously and conduct a voice chat on what you are viewing
You may use the shared file space to construct documents collaboratively with voice or text chat open for discussion as you work.
Another great advantage of Groove is the fact that you can use it offline. You can create discussion threads, edit shared documents, and upload files while offline, and everything in your shared spaces is automatically updated when you go online.
A downside of this wonderful product is the size of the installation file. It's around 15MB - not a speedy download via home modems (which is where I wanted to use it because even though Groove boasts the ability to penetrate firewalls, TAFE firewalls render Groove useless) so I downloaded it at work on to a CD and installed painlessly and quickly from there. Obviously a 15 MB download and install is not something you want to put students through, and this may seriously limit its use in educational settings.
However, at this stage Groove is still free for individual use. Despite its size it does run quite smoothly on a home modem connection, and the quality of its audio is excellent.
Groove has been designed primarily for collaboration on projects in the business world, but is in my opinion also precisely the product online teachers need. My bet is that WebCT and Blackboard will feel the heat from products like Groove, because it models the communication possibilities better than these platforms ever did. I can imagine using something like WebCT to house my content and assessments, but taking my students outside to Groove for synchronous online activity.
It's big and a tad confusing initially, but it's free and worth the trouble. I'd pay hundreds of dollars for it in fact. (Perhaps I shouldn't have said that!) Actually, Groove seems to be going the way of many previous Internet vendors. You release the product as a freebie long enough for people to become dependent on it, and then start charging. They are however up front about it on their website, but it is not clear when they will start charging.
So, get in the groove (and I'm sure they knew that's exactly people would say when they chose the name for this product!)
