Social Software

In this new entry of the blog I want to share the importance of social networking in the research community nowadays. In the world we are living in, we have to take advantage of social software. This is a name that encapsulates many tools that we have to keep in touch with our colleagues almost instantaneously. Moreover, not only these tools help us to work in real time with our colleagues, but also to save large amounts of time. As you will see in the following examples, they allow us to do many things that in the old-school manner (sharing by email a document and receiving comments back for example) would have been far more time-consuming.

 

A leading provider of these kind of tools is Google, with its Google Apps service. Having just a free google account, it gives us many kinds of documents that we can write, edit, share and receive instantaneous comments from our collaborators; or even directly edition from them. This is really helpful when it comes to do collaborative work (research), both for the research work itself (for instance a spreadsheet) and for its presentation (ppt presentations).

 

To have some examples, you can see the following:

• Document: You can see below (and in this link) a document that talks about the measurement of multivariate analysis performance, that has been written mainly by me but has also contributions from other colleagues.
  

 

• Presentation: This tool is really helpful to present results that may have been produced by a group of collaborators. For example you can see below a presentation related with my field of study that could have been edited both by me and my colleagues.
  

• Spreadsheet: Also Google provides the option of sharing spreadsheets like this one. In this example we have the grades of different students. If you have teaching duties as part of your work, and have to asses the grades of students together with some of your colleagues (because the teaching is shared for example), this can be useful.
  
  
  

• Forms: Very useful tool to do polls and obtain some results from them. An example is shown here (sorry for the spanish :))
  
  
  
  

Obviously, it also these tools included in Google Drive also allow us to organize all our stuff. You can see an example of how I organized all the documents linked in this entry, as well as a specific folder where I saved some articles of interest for my work:

Personally, I use almost everyday these tools and the efficiency of my work has exponentially increased thanks to them. I am really happy to have these resources so handy, and I encourage you to incorporate them in your day by day research work.