Ben Tomasini Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Sometimes I read books because I want to.  Being in school, I usually read books because I have to.  In either case, it is nice to have someone else summarize the book for you, like this video summary of “The Long Tail”:

http://www.readitfor.me/2009/05/book-summary-10-the-long-tail-by-chris-anderson/

Reasons why I like this:

• It is entertaining
• It can provide a good mental “glue” as I dive into the detail in the pages
• I think you can get 50% of the value of a book in these summaries.  What is important is the main thesis.  Much of the rest is context and filler.  Often times you can support the thesis with your own experience.
• Professors often ask for summary analysis.  Shortcut?  Sure.  I call it efficiency.

Disclaimer in case my professor is reading this:  I am reading the book in its entirety. 

I recently started an MBA program, and like most, it requires a lot of group work.  Groups often collaborate on projects by emailing Word documents.  I abhor this because it is so painful to work on the same document concurrently.  As the geek of the group, pitched the idea of using a Wiki and setup a Doku instance for us on my TextDrive account.  Doku doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor, so asking a group of non-techies to use a markup language was a bit of a hard sell.

Two courses and four projects later, the Wiki is really working for everyone.  Everyone loves the fact that our project content is always fresh, everyone can jump in an edit, and old versions are tracked.  We have created a namespace for each class and enter all of our contents for project drafts.  The Wiki format means we get lots of content and minimal formatting.  When it comes time to turn in the assignment, one of us copies the content into a Word doc.  It has been gratifying to see our mostly non-techie group using it.

We hit some snags along the way.  A couple in the group tried to just dump Word documents into the Wiki and were frustrated with the garbage that was displayed.  I offered to fix up any formatting issues right away and eventually everyone got the hang of the simple syntax.  And since most of the work is just headings, text, and bullet lists, it wasn’t much of an issue.  The group also had a problem working with the Wiki when I broke up projects into smaller documents with links.  In fact, everyone really got on board when I changed the format and put all of the content for a project on a single page

Wikis are better than emailing Word documents.  If you find yourself struggling to coordinate group work, give a Wiki a try.  Plain text is your friend.