Wave is extremely powerful groupware, designed to facilitate the interactions of groups working together on projects—which turns out to be a pretty good description of many college classes.

Class notes project (10%): Over the course of the semester, you will compile a set of collaborative notes for the class, detailing the important issues from our readings, the main threads of our discussions, any questions that we raise that remain open, and so forth. You’ll use a combination of Google Wave and Google Docs for these notes, Wave for the initial notetaking and discussion and Docs for the final product. Each of you will serve as lead notetaker during at least one class session, though you’ll be expected to contribute to the collaborative notes for every class period.

A networked teaching lab: I teach most of my classes in a laptop-based lab, one that allows me to pull the computers out whenever I want to use them and tuck them safely away when I don't. This semester, I decided to use them every day, and invited any of my students who had their own laptops to bring them to class if they preferred working on them.