We have reached a major milestone in our conversion to Google. With a few exceptions, all of our current students, faculty and staff have been moved to Google Apps for Education. Kudos to the hard work of the Google Team. They did a terrific job of planning, training, executing, responding to emergencies and most importantly providing the TLC where needed. We are working towards moving the Meeting Maker calendar over to Google Calendar. I hear that many departments are not waiting – they have already moved.

This transition, like all others, has brought changes in the way we use technology for communication. FirstClass, which was self-contained, was the single point of communication for the campus. We are trying to do the same with tools that Google Apps provides, but it is not the same and raising concerns.

When I came to the campus for the second interview last year, a student from South Africa took me on a campus tour. I would ask her things like “is there a classified like system?” and she would tell me “there is a FC conference for that” and there were FC conferences for anything you wanted to do. Now, we are replicating that with Google groups, however, there are significant differences between the two.

I won’t go into the detailed comparison between the two – like all tools each has its own advantages and disadvantages. The key difference is the user interface. In FC, whether it is a conference or your email, your interaction is identical when it came to posting a message or receiving new email notifications through the red flag. The user interface for Google Groups is very different from that of Email. For eg. the interface for posting messages is primitive – no image inclusion, no attachments, no text styling etc. whereas when you compose an email in GMail, all these are possible.

However, you can interact with the groups right from your GMail to avoid this issue – receive the emails posted to the groups as individual emails or a digest, filter them by labels and show them only if there are new emails (red flag equivalent) as well as post to the groups with image inclusion and attachments etc. It is a workaround which need to be communicated and users have to be trained etc. Then you are dealing with the age old issue – when the mode of communication is the issue, how do you communicate about it?

The good news is that we have over 750 Google groups and many of them are receiving messages regularly. Some would complain that this is too many, but this is not an unusual number in comparison to the number of FC conferences. The fear is that the users may not be reading them. The fact that many of them have several hundred subscribers would argue the contrary. Several users fear that some may have taken this opportunity to unbundle the communication further by moving some of the actions to other technologies such as Facebook. This is a legitimate concern.

Some of the issues that are coming to the surface are well known issues that would have existed even in FirstClass. This has to do with what is “effective communication” and how much communication is the “right communication”.  The simple answer to this is that it is all in the eyes of the beholder!

We will be discussing various strategies with different groups to make the current environment work for us so active and participatory communication takes place. As we know, many of these issues are not simply technology related. We need to define our goals, bring clarity and commitment to process (where, what types of communications will be posted and make sure that the responsible parties are identified), launch an aggressive communication (multi-modal) and provide effective training.

I am sure that like all the changes, this is a blip that will come to pass and we will find ways to engage in effective communication. We like to engage in discussions and debates. This is who we are and we will find a way to get back to it. We just need a topic that many are passionate about!