Collaborative writing: Doingtext

My experience with GoogleDocs as a collaborative text tool has been quite frustrating. The fact is I’ve never had a problem when using GoogleDocs on my own, as a word processor or when sharing the document with someone else. But when I tried to use GoogleDocs as a classroom tool, mayhem ahead. After getting over the shock of realizing that 90% of my digital native students didn’t know what GoogleDocs was, problems started when they started to add collaborators to their projects. More than 15/20 mins of class time was spent in overcoming the hassle of signing up, activating account, etc. Some of them, who incidentally didn’t have a Gmail account, got locked out. Welcome to GoogleDocs, collaborative hurdling.

Via gotoweb2.0 feeds, I came across Etherpad and DoingText. DoingText is currently beta-invite (I have 10 invites, just leave a comment below if you want one).

DoingText main claim: “No login required”.

Well, actually, you need to sign up and login to paste/create your own discussion but it’s true that you don’t need to have an account to start editing someone else’s text (unlike GoogleDocs).

To create/start your own editable text:

• Sign up + log in
• This is what I see when I log in:

• This is the “Discussion window”:

Changes in lines are color-coded, thus showing the difference between versions: green is for insertions and red for deletions. Comments are also differentiated with colors: the comment balloon is dark green when you’re the author of the comment and dark orange for collaborators.The older the comment is, the paler the color is.

• Commands: share, history, download, presentation:

If you click on share:

You’re given the link to share your text with others (who won’t need to sign up/log in to work on it). Regarding the permissions, if you click on “Publish” you make it “public” and will appear in the site wide search (you can undo this option). You can also lock your doc by setting a password and then you would need to add your collaborators manually (”Add collaborators”).

If you click on “Download”, you can export your text to txt, pdf or xml (this one including the comments). “History” gives you all the edits, comments, etc. You can also keep track of this by subscribing to each discussion’s feeds (which will show up to 50 comments at once):

Positive things:

• Easiness of use.
• OpenID registration.

Negative things:

• Easiness of use at the expense of maybe too simplistic features: can we collaborate on texts with objects, pics, etc. or those “advanced” features are only for GoogleDocs?; formatting is time consuming and a pain for those who don’t want to care about code and the like, I miss some sort of wysiwyg editor.

Future: translation into Spanish? tool’s integration into educational/learning environments?

I wonder if there’s something like this for “powerpoint/keynote/impress” presentations. Any suggestion?

PS: And now I’m going to give Etherpad a try, I know it has more features such as real-time chat. We’ll see.