Google Docs is Your Friend - Psy Group Project Lit Review

I haven't posted in nearly a week, not because I had nothing to say, but because I was trying to focus. Had a group project due today. Pretty much we had to research, summarize, and put together a paper that describes all the related previous research for the project we chose. That sounds fairly simple. But we had to cite at least twenty peer reviewed journal articles. And that means finding and reading much, much more than twenty articles. Thankfully things are easier now with internet databases at our finger tips, but still... it's like going to a wikipedia article, then clicking on a link in the article to lead you to another, which will lead to another, and another, until you found enough useful information to tell the story you want to tell.

Thankfully my group members did their share of the work for the most part. Certainly one of the best groups I've worked with in recent memory. I did not feel like I was alone doing all the work. One of them didn't help as much when consolidating our different segments of the paper into one coherent paper with one coherent voice, but he did a lot of research, and I find that to be the harder part. I enjoy writing.

And even with just three people, sometimes it's hard to get together all at the same time, but I came up with the idea to use Google Docs from the beginning. If we found an article, we numbered it, linked it, and put it up there. If someone summarized an article, even one that they didn't find themselves, they left the notes up there for everyone to see. If we had messages to each other, we left them up there. And you can see when other people are on there the same time as you.

There is no chat feature incorporated into the software, but eventually I came up with the idea to just box off the top section of the doc with some dashed lines, and labeled it chatbox. So when we put together the final paper, and edited each other's sections, and went through the checklist of things we needed to accomplish, we could leave messages for each other fairly easily, since we knew to periodically look up and check for new messages. Not as convenient as a true chat feature, but came pretty close.

Google docs is such a beautiful program. Simultaneous editing until 3am in the morning, all from the comfort of our own homes even though we live pretty far apart. And no need for one person to do the work, email it to everyone else and have them review it, and then someone else revise and email it out again. So convenient, so useful. Google docs is your friend.