Dear English 149 students,
In talking to one of our class's project teams after class today, the question of how team members are communicating with each other came up. It seems that many of you are using a combination of texting and email.
I thought I'd share with you two commonly used team collaboration discussion/chat tools that are today widely used by project teams in business, universities, and elsewhere.
The most famous is Slack, a platform that allows team members to do texting-like "chat" in "channels". For example, you could set up channels for discussing/collaborating for various aspects of your project (in the way a business team might have discussion channels for "marketing," "software programming," "user-interface design," "online publicity," etc.) (More info on Wikipedia about Slack and its features here.)
The platform that my own research project teams use is Ryver, which is like Slack in allowing you to organize chat and discussion into what Ryver calls "private teams" (e.g., a team including some of you for Twine design, another for text analysis, etc.). Ryver allows you to post "topics" in a team space that are like mini-blog posts with links, images, etc. (where each post can be replied to by others in a thread).
Both these platforms are free (though businesses can upgrade to get extra features); both can be used on multiple devices (computers, mobile phones); and both allow you to configure "notifications." (One handy thing is to get a text or email if a teammate posts something or replies.)
One thing I especially like about these kinds of collaboration tools is that they put your team chat all by itself outside your other texts or emails, letting you decide when you want to focus on that. Also, it's a lot easier to find something again in that separate space, by contrast with trying to find and remember a conversation distributed in your texts or your email.
--Best, Alan
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