November 28, 2007

As I have stated before, I am in an online Masters in Applied Anthropology program. These past two days I’ve been collaborating with my partner over Basecamp which has been a very interesting experience. We are only using the free version at the moment so we are limited to 2 writeboards and can’t upload files. But working around those obstacles we deleted our last project out and created a new one for our analysis then we separated the two parts of our project between the two writeboards. Within 8 hours we had 7 different iterations and 9 comments on one write board, plus 32 emails, 2 slide presentations, and two written reports.

Though there actually came a point though were we had to use the phone in order to clear up some questions we each had, I’m amazed at how well Basecamp worked for us. At first I thought it was a bit of overkill for just two people working on a single project, but with the ability to do different versions as well as compare differences was pretty awesome. I think the best part of it all for us poor college students is the fact that there is a free version! It is likely that as my college career continues I’ll go ahead and spring for one of the paid versions, especially if I ever end up in a group with more than 2 people and/or really need the upload capabilities.

I think I’ll seek out other online collaboration sites to do more of a compare and contrast. Anyone have any suggestions?