Much has been said about the transition into Cloud Computing and the potential it has to increase collaboration and make tasks seamless and a better user experience.
This week at MacWorld Apple introduced iWork.com, it is a new service that brings Apple closer on the promise of Cloud Computing and a nice addition to other services as Google Documents.
I will be the first to admit that I have not used Google Documents often and even less the new iWork package, which was just released less than 48 hours ago.
My trouble with the direction of these services is that there is currently no software as a service that allows people to keep things within an intranet, be it their home or their office. I simply don’t buy into it just yet. I’d like to see a way to sync documents from my laptop to my desktop at home, but nowhere else (if I so choose to).
Virtual Writing Center
If I were a school I’d see the wonders that sharing documents has for paper reviews, the teacher-student interaction as well as how it is a fundamental shift on the notion of a “Writing Center”. Guess what? It is now digital and leverages more collaboration than ever before.
For example: iChat. You can now have a virtual Writing Center where teachers and students interact through tools like iChat, they have visual interaction as well as being able to share the screen for document reviews or slideshows. With Google Documents you can do great collaboration and I am still learning on how to best use it.
What I see as a measure that prevents adoption is , ironically, The Cloud. If I was a school administrator or an executive at a company, I don’t want my intellectual property outside of my control. iWork.com and Google Documents are out of the question (at this point in their development process). However, if there was an “iWork Server” that I can keep on my intranet, it would be different.
Hesitation.
You may wonder why I hesitate so much about “The Cloud”, this stems from my experience on a multi-country study abroad program called “The Scholar Ship” which was hosted on a transformed cruise ship that served as a floating campus.We traveled over 22,000 nautical miles on 16 weeks from Greece, Portugal, Panama, Ecuador, French Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia and China (Shanghai + Hong Kong).
During the time onboard I fundamentally reshaped my perspective on cloud computing. We had an intranet and barely had connectivity to “the world”. We only had internet access when there was satellite coverage and the speed was spread across the ship. It was slow…slower than dial-up… yes… DIAL-UP divided in 200 people!
- It took me 5-7 minutes to login on the mobile facebook website.
- Our star librarian logged in for us to get a news brief everyday since we only had 200 minutes of internet access included in our tuition before paying per-minute for internet access.
- I was supposed to upload NautiCast from the ship, but this sadly happened 2 months after I returned to the mainland.
Living unwired was the most eye-opening experience of my life. For a ‘Millennial” to be unwired was hard, yet it illustrated to me how millions of people my age live each and every day. Perhaps most, this happened on a cruise ship which is not at all the conditions under which you are digitally divided in the mainland. A lot of learning and humbling indeed.
When I was in High School at TEC de Monterrey in Guadalajara, we began using Lotus Notes in 1998. This platform had its limitations but it was on the intranet. Its Instructional Design was adequate and we were able to have groups, forums, quizzes and several networking tools long before blogging really even began to grow.
Something that I learned back then is that there are virtues to have things on the intranet. Being on the ship was the major next step of this approach and I learned that in order to have good Cloud Computing, you really need a fantastic intranet design. They go in tandem, but the intranet is your ultimate repository of knowledge, you should have backups after backups, etc.
Google: You were missed.
During our voyage we had an intranet where we primarily had Zimbra and an intranet site to post updates of the community and news about voyages. We also used moodle for school work as well as student organizations.
Remember: there is no internet access, so there was no Ning, no WordPress, no facebook nor a way to have a “server” of them that could easily sync once we arrived at a port of call. This feature would have been great for podcasting, blogging, etc. Google Documents would have been a killer feature, but, again, you can’t have it on the intranet.
Doing searches for academic work had physical limitations as well. We only had the materials that we could bring on a container for the onboard Learning Resource Center. This was again an opening experience but in many ways after several weeks it was clear that we where there for the Experiential Learning opportunity in the long haul.
The Niche that isn’t
What would be interesting when we sail again is to include close cooperation agreements with companies, research centers and organizations that would like to better integrate web services, develop, consolidate and improve new collaboration models in a 24/7 closed environment that a cruise ship provides. It may look like a niche market until you realize the amount of people that cross the oceans daily be it in the navy, for tourism or other reasons. As I opened my eyes (and grew my sea legs) it was not far fetched to acknowledge that this environment nicely extrapolates to space exploration. There is a lot of social research that can be conducted as well as great learning that can be applied for space tourism. For example: Virgin Galactic and beyond.
This was the hugely missed opportunity and value that Royal Caribbean lost by phasing out The Scholar Ship. I hope they reconsider this as TSS can be host to many companies, organizations, bringing their very own value, innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s Silicon Valley – at Sea!
[Editor note: If you feel compelled to make this vision happen, please contact arturo.pelayo [at] gmail [dot] com ]
