Forget the chainsaw… more great tools for librarians (and the rest of us) to love

Or at least like...

Once upon a time William Gibson posited the then-novel idea that human beings would spend most of their time jacked into computers. And guess what? In today’s post-post-cyberpunk world, we kind of do. More and more far-flung work teams work on complex projects with team members in outlying areas never meeting face-to-face. A growing educational trend reflects this shift with online classes and collaborative learning teams designed for working adults who never meet in the classroom, yet complete group assignments in entirely virtual environments. But whether you’re completing a project with someone in the next cubicle or with someone in China or with someone 20 miles away at another branch of the same organization, Writeboard is a great tool to know about.

Writeboard is a Web-based writing tool that allows teams (or individuals) to create and save multiple drafts of documents. Just from a teaching perspective, Writeboard looks like a good thing. It allows team members to write, revise, and share documents in real time, and it allows writers and contributors to compare different versions of a document and (presumably) agree on a final draft. For anyone who has ever had the frustrating experience of trying to read a Word document with revisions, or for anyone who has had his or her work edited with no “history” of the changes made, or even for employers or teachers wanting to evaluate multiple drafts and team input, Writepoint may be worth checking out.

On another note, Stikkit is a Web-based tool that gathers address books, tasks, memorandums, calendars, email, and more into one place. It does many of the things I currently do with Outlook (at work) and MSN (at home), but, since it’s Web-based like del.icio.us, it offers more convenient opportunities for using it from any location, rather than from just a work or personal computer. It also appears to have greater capabilities for tagging and organizing one’s life. Feeling disorganized? Then Stikkit may be worth a look.