As I wrote last week, most of us here at ProfHacker will be attending one of the two THATCamps taking place this weekend. My bag is packed with what is probably a ridiculous number of essential geek tools, and I’m looking forward to the conversations and collaborations in the days ahead.
My advice to others either attending these unconferences or following along from a distance is to create a PBworks account--if you don’t already have one--so that you can contribute to the THATCamp wiki (the PBworks user manual shows you the basics) and to get a GoogleDocs account (GDocs support documents are helpful) so that you can collaborate in real time with others in the creation or editing of documents (see below for more).
For some pre-THATCamp reading (related to the above suggestions) consider the following:
Using an online writing environment--such as GoogleDocs or a wiki--makes collaboration easier and side steps the problems that can arise when several authors are e-mailing each other different drafts of the same document
When several different people are taking notes about the same topic, using a shared online document is an effective way to keep track of all of the different contributions.
If you and your collaborators need to make significant progress on a document in a short period of time, here’s one way to do it.
Social medial tools like Facebook and Twitter can help get you through your to-do list, instead of distracting you from it. Here’s a simple strategy for breaking out of procrastination.
Collaborating with others on large and ongoing projects can be tricky, but it’s much easier if you use a few online tools wisely.
Now, these are just my suggestions. How about you? How are you preparing for THATCamp?
[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Karin Dalziel]
