Academics at Google Working Together Apart with Gary and Judy Olson

In the new era of cloud computing and the emergence of group-friendly platforms like Google docs, Gary and Judy Olson of UC Irvine are trying to understand exactly how it's changing the nature of collaboration. of UC Irvine have been exploring the use of Google Docs for collaboration in a variety of venues and at several different levels of analyses. One project is examining the roll-out of Google Apps as infrastructure on several university campuses. Another element of the study has been to interview students and faculty about their understanding of the "cloud." This has revealed considerable confusion about how it works. At a more micro level, they have been examining different structures and models of collaborative documents in Google Docs and trying to answer the question, What is the best way to work together?
They have developed two new tools: DocuFlow to generate visualizations of the participation of the members of a group, and Novox, for analyzing the change of voice or style in a collaborative document. Here they summarize the results for these projects, including identifying some ongoing issues with carrying out their experiments.
They also briefly summarize some work done by two graduate students on issues of culture.