Learning Blog Two: Google Docs

Google Docs is an additional function created by the search engine Google in order to be able to store or create documents on the internet. This enables you to access your documents from any computer and or allows you to share your documents with others. In order to be able to use Google Docs it requires a Google email account however on this occasion this did not cause a problem as previously within this course we had to create a Google email account in order to use Google Reader to monitor our peers blogs. The site allows you to apply different share settings to the documents you store on Google; Anybody can access it, Those who have been provided with the link can access it (When a document is uploaded an the share settings selected Google provides you with a link to this webpage of your document which you can email to others), or private settings where you can invite certain people to be able to access your work which requires them to sign in. Google Docs also had the facility to create a range of documents including, Microsoft Word, Excel and Publisher documents.

The concept of being able to access you work from anywhere without the use of a memory stick is useful however the use of Google Docs to store documents I do not believe to be a secure storage of information and in storing any information resulting from my primary research would cause ethical issues as I had not stated the possibility of this being done to the participants within my research. Uploading this information having not informed my participants of this would not have been good ethical practice. I did however use Google Docs to allow my interview subjects to access the ‘Informed Consent Form’ for my project to enable them to read it before the interview (As I had not met in person the subject of my interviews before the conduction). This was an easy, convenient and quick way to provide information to the participants, to ensure that they were fully informed about the project (I took a paper copy to the interview, in order to obtain a signed copy from the participants). Although throughout much of this project I have considered Google Docs an insecure way to store work once my the first draft of my project was submitted (this way an potential leaks of my work onto the internet from Google Docs it could not be brought into doubt if any work was copied from the internet) I found Google Docs useful in illustrating some help that I provided to a peer. The best way to explain to her what I was trying to convey was to provided an example however the work was simply too large to publish on her blog therefore by giving a brief explanation and signposting her to Google docs I was able provide her with advice in an applied way.

For information that is not confidential Google Docs is a useful tool to distribute a document to a number of people and I believe would be useful if a person does not have their own computer from which to work as Google Docs is more reliable than a memory stick which can be lost however due to ethical consideration to obtain feedback on my own project this was not possible.