September 20, 2006
Gliffy Collaborative Image Drawing Tool
A week in to using a Macbook Pro as my main machine (running Parallels for the odd Windows moment) and I realised today that OS/X doesn't come with a drawing package. The GIMP required a big download, and Microsoft Paint running in Parallels was not quite up to scratch, so instead I checked my bookmarks for an online drawing package, and came up with Gliffy, a Flash based drawing tool, and then some...
More to the point, Gliffy is an online, collaborative drawing package, with flowchart, UML, network, user interface, floorplan and basic shape palettes, as well as various colour fills and a small selection of text fonts. Line and connector tools are also provided, along with a range of line and arrow styles.
Collabaration is achieved by entering collaborators' email addresses, which are also used as user names in Glffy, an approach I've started noticing more and more in collaborative online apps (it's the approach used by Pageflakes too, for example). By encouraging collaboration, the developers also manage to grow their user base for the app; enforcing email usernames guarantees a relatively pain free way of getting new user collaborators into the system.
Images can be worked on (presumably at separate times) by all the registered collaborators on an image. Images can be saved onto Gliffy servers as either public or private images. Public images can then be linked into other websites as required, line this one for example:
A range of export options - SVG, JPG or PNG, are also supported.
Tools like Gliffy offer interesting possibilities for group based activities, particularly in the OU context where our students all work at a distance. The ability to collaborate in a private group on a drawing, and then export it for inclusion in the student's own work, is an opportunity we have been unable to offer to date, so far as I know.
There's a new OU course, T885 - Team Engineering, due to start in October that requires students to "explore an engineering ‘problem’ in depth, working as part of a small team. The problem could be developing a product, such as a car door, improving a manufacturing process, such as forming steel sheet, or working with a variety of other engineering systems. Whatever the problem, its investigation will cover technical, environmental and business aspects and many will include a computing/software dimension."
This course is potentially breaking some new ground for the OU, too: "T885 is a not a content-focused course. Instead, you and your team will be responsible for gathering together the information you need to pursue your project." Hmm - I wonder if this means we'll be encouraging students to explore the range of 'out there' online, collaborative applications - like Gliffy, Writely, Basecamp, Jotspot, and so on - at the expense the tools that are (or are not...) likely to be delivered via the new Moodle VLE...?
Just by the by, I also note that Writely logins are moving over to Google authentication any time now...
Posted by ajh59 at September 20, 2006 07:21 PM