http://wiggio.com

The basics

Wiggio is groupware. It brings together various key distributed groupwork features into a simple, clean package.As the site says “Wiggio.com is a free, online toolkit that makes it easy to work in groups. e started Wiggio out of our own frustrations with endless email chains, using five different websites for five different functions, and all the other hassles associated with working in groups. We were tired of sending eleven emails back and forth to set a meeting time. We were tired of “that guy” who just never knows where and when to be there. We were tired of multiple mailing lists, contact books, phone-chains and incompatibilities. We wanted everything to be in one place, and we wanted it simple. Working in groups is inherently frustrating. We designed Wiggio to be easy and straightforward – it provides everything you need to work productively in your groups, without bogging you down with complexities, help menus and unnecessary features. Everyone will be able to use Wiggio”

Wiggio has an elegant Facebook style stream of comments, calendars, to-do lists, shared document and link spaces, realtime chat (including voice and video).

Note: since this presentation was written, Wiggio has announced a much improved version 2 including mobile device features.

Slides

Presenting the key affordances and possible uses of Wiggio:

Video

Discussion and live demonstration of slides:

What is great

Wiggio is great because it is simple and clean to use. All the tools are there, and they work together nicely, but the main focus is on creating a space for collaboration, rather than on the technology itself. Two features stand out: first, the system utilises email to push information out to group members, ensuring they know that something is happening in their group space. Second, ‘conversation’ is de-emphasised over sharing of resources and activities. That said, there are great inbuilt realtime chat tools. One advantage of groupware such as this is the integration of (for example) a polling system which can be used to solicit appropriate times for chat, the calendar which will alert people that a chat is happening, and the chat technology itself.

Scenarios for using this tool

Multiple private tutorial groups

200 students in a fully online unit studying history. Because of the extensive number of students, individually oriented online discussion has become difficult to manage and, instead, the teacher wishes to form virtual ‘tutorials’ of 20-30 students each. They are all assigned to a single Wiggio group; the unit controller belongs to all groups; the tutors belong only to their tutorial groups. There is no formal discussion facility within wiggio, but the notes and email approach provides sufficient asynchronous communication for the purposes of getting each group to work on a collaborative presentation to all other groups. This presentation is then done using different technologies, such as sharepoint, prezi or even within the normal LMS.

Wiggio:

• provides a different flavour for discussion and collaboration than the ubiquitous (and often timeconsuming) discussion group;
• has great features for managing collective tasks such as to do lists and calendars; and
• is easy to populate with students, via emails to each of them, inviting them to join.

Working as a real group

An advanced photography unit is being run in a fully online mode with 24 students. While the primary focus of the students’ work is to create excellent images with both direct photography and photomanipulation to come up with a virtual exhibition in Flickr, there needs to be considerable background discussion and organisation of both the exhibition itself and the ideas and concepts in the unit. The unit controller establishes a single Wiggio group to which all students are invited. She then uses that group to arrange and hold formal ‘classes’ online, using video and chat, as well as to encourage the students to interact informally among themselves. At first, much of the work of the students is devoted to reading, adding to, and discussing the information provided by the teacher through the folder section, with the teacher controlling the process through messages and task schedules. Then, as the students move towards finalising their exhibition, and each is assigned specific tasks in relation to it, the groupware is used more for management.

Wiggio:

• pushes activity out to all individuals via emails;
• has an easy to use, Facebook style stream of conversation; and
• allows for realtime chats when needed – transcripts of which can be reviewed by any who missed the time.

Alternatives

Enterthegroup compares favourably to Wiggio; alternatively there is Grouptable. Mashable, a key technology blog, lists more than sixty similar applications, though many of them cost money to use.

Further discussion and concepts

Costagliola, G. et al. 2004. An approach for the creation of collaborative environments. Information Technology: Research and Education, 2004. ITRE 2004. 2nd International Conference.

Robins, R. and Butler, B. 2009. Teaching and Learning Collaboratively and Virtually. AMCIS 2009 Proceedings.

Thaw, D. et al. 2009. Communities of Practice Environment (CoPE): Democratic CSCW for Group Production and E-Learning. Studies in Computational Intelligence, 246; 65-81.