5 Tips for Using Google Wave to Write an Academic Paper

I am in my final semester at university right now, and for one of my senior classes, I have to do a group research project and write a group paper summarizing and explaining research with five other people. In my whole college career, I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to write a group paper as I have been when we received this assignment.

I don’t think the rest of my group really understood why I was so excited, but the fact was, I couldn’t wait to try Google Wave out to see how it would work with writing a group paper. I’ll tell you what I think of using Google Wave to write a group paper, but here are some things I’ve learned so far in the process.

7 Unique Ways to Use Google Wave… that maybe You didn’t Think of

We’ve all probably heard by now of the real basic and practical ways of using Google Wave like: note taking, brainstorming, organizing events, social networking, etc., but I wanted to compile a list that thought a little bit outside of the box.

And I wanted to ask you, based on your own areas of work, interests, and ideas, what creative, unique, or practical ways to use Google Wave have you come up with or used? I thought it’d be cool if we could start some sort of list.

1.) Songwriting

Aside from being a part-time internet geek, I’m also a musician and songwriter. It’s pretty common to collaborate and to co-write with other folks for some projects that I do. My brother also writes too, and often times we just send a bunch of emails back and forth with revisions and edits. The email copies quickly accumulate.

How Do You Delete a Wave?

Google Wave is intuitive, but it isn’t quite as simple as email. In Wave, you can’t just hit a “Delete” button to get rid of a wave forever. Deleting aside, there are other options to manage your waves; there are some big differences between unfollowing, archiving, and trashing waves (which is recommended reading).

Despite these useful options for managing waves, people still seem to be a bit stumped about the basic function of deleting a wave. Well, the reason why you haven’t figured out how to “delete a wave” (in the most conventional sense) is because you can’t.

Unfollow, Archive, & Trash Explained

In Google Wave, you have a variety of choices for how you want to organize the waves you’re interested in and not interested in. It’s helpful to be able to make the distinction between unfollowing a wave, archiving a wave, and moving a wave to the trash.

Unfollow or Follow a wave

When you are added as a user to a wave or participate in a wave, you are set automatically to follow that wave. A followed wave is one that remains in your inbox and any updates to the wave are reflected in your inbox.

If you’re searching for public waves, and you find one that interests you, you can open that wave and read it without following the wave. In order to follow the wave you must have the wave opened and then click the “Follow” button in the toolbar of the wave.

5 Things to Do When You First Get Google Wave

If you are lucky enough to get an invitation to Google Wave, you are probably pretty excited to get such a sought after prize, but now that you are logged in to Wave, what do you do now?

At a first glance in Google Wave, you’ll notice there is a navigation box in the top left corner of the interface, a contacts list in the bottom left of the interface, a listing of waves in the middle of the interface, and to the very right of the interface, waves are displayed.

Make Your First Wave

If you click the “New Wave” button at the top of the middle column, a new wave will appear in the right column. At the top of the wave, there is a “+” sign right by your name. If you click this, you can add more participants to the wave.

In the wave, you can add rich-text, pictures, maps, and other media. You might want to learn some helpful hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts too.

Why is Google Wave So Hard to Understand?

Google Wave is a pretty new idea that seemingly changes the way people communicate. Despite this massive change in the way people communicate, “waving” your friends hasn’t spread like wildfire just quite yet. This could be for a number of reasons: Google’s somewhat closed “invitation system”, the lack of publicity surrounding Google Wave, or because people just don’t want to change and would rather stick with their email inbox instead of their Wave inbox. In sum, Google Wave still has a lot of people stumped.

What is Google Wave?

In the 1960s, one of the first emails was sent and received. This method of communication drastically changed the way we communicate. However, since then, email has stayed relatively the same.

Fast forward more than 40 years later and meet Google Wave. The team behind Google Wave describes it as “what email would look like if it were invented today.” Unlike email, users are able to communicate and collaborate with one another in real-time with text, photos, videos, and much more.

But what does this all even really mean?

Meeting Google Wave For the First Time

When you send an email to someone and they respond back to you, multiple copies of the email are sent, stored, and received. If you continue this conversation, the copies of this email quickly accumulate in your and the other person’s inbox and other folders. Google Wave’s solution is too eliminate multiple copies of a conversation into one live document known as a “wave.”