Google drives us crazy, but less than Blackboard

When I was Editor-in-Chief of Horizons, my adviser and I spent a good deal of time griping about Blackboard, the online platform for coursework used by many colleges and universities.

If you've never encountered it, imagine returning to the days before Web 2.0, when most websites were text-based and chat rooms dominated. The interface is almost unnavigable. You have to search to find some basic tools. It's hierarchically layered, meaning you often have to click through a whole series of links to get to the section of the course you're looking for.

Blackboard has gone through a few revisions in the last five years, but its basic structure remains unchanged.

Blackboard was - and remains - an unwieldy way to run a newspaper.

 

Blackboard can be difficult to navigate and lacks some of the functions suited to producing a newspaper.

Screenshot by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Around the same time as my adviser and I were airing our frustrations to each other, cloud-based computing was exploding across the Internet. Hundreds of new services were offering to store your documents, your videos, even your most-used Internet links.

We decided to investigate the options. There had to be a more efficient way to collaborate.

Eventually we settled on Google Docs (now Google Drive). It had some compelling properties. The document template was similar to Microsoft Word, and could handle conversions from multiple formats. Reporters, editors and the professor could all share the same document (previously drafts and revisions had to be saved as new versions and emailed back and forth). Changes could be tracked and undone easily. Collaborators could chat in real time.

Since then, the Publications class has relied heavily on Google Drive. Most of the course documents are kept there. Last week, one of the students shared a spreadsheet listing various college events that reporters could write about for a story. The list can be added to by anyone in the class as they find out about more events scheduled throughout the semester.

 

Google Drive allows for users to have conversations within a document, making the editing process much easier.

Screenshot by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Google Drive does have some drawbacks that were on display during Monday's class session. I had to walk a few students through the process of creating a Google account. Many of the Publications I students had to be shown how to use things like the “share” function. One student became confused when she tried to share her document with the professor and kept getting an error message. When I had her reload the page, the document showed it had already been shared.

These and other problems were reminders that no system is perfect. Still, the cloud has carried us a few feet closer than we were.