- Collaborative document editing reduces the emails flying around. Learn.gold has wikis, there are Goldsmiths wikis, or no end of excellent third party shared document editing environments like Google Docs and Zoho. Most keep a record of the history (versions) of a document, and allow you to roll back to a previous version if necessary.
- Sharing bookmarks and web page annotation - e.g. Diigo - allows you to set up a group, bookmark online resources, and highlight or annotate these.
- Group blogging to record developments on your project - reduces the emails flying around. Wordpress is an excellent, highly configurable blogging environment, and Goldsmiths hosts its own too.
- Learn.gold grouped discussion Forums - learn.gold is particularly helpful because it sets out discussions so you can see at a glance who said what in response to whom - especially if the participants have uploaded a profile picture. Learn.gold Forums can be set to email messages to participants, as well as displaying them within learn.gold.
- Easily setting up meetings and other events with e.g. Doodle. No need for sign-up, and the organiser can see at a glance on who can make which dates and times (staff can use this in combination with Oracle Calendar).
- Real-time group online meetings with audio, video and/or instant messaging, in software where you can share your desktop with other participants. Skype is the most prevalent software for this. There's software for recording Skype audio, too.
- Pull the aforementioned elements together with a quick DIY group homepage - PageFlakes is one way.
Surprisingly for 2008, the art of using social software was completely absent from Harriet Swain's How to be a Student article on The Art of Working in a Team in last week's Guardian. It's true that face-to-face contact is irreplacable - but what about all the written-down or shared stuff, and what happens if you need to discuss something at short notice? So to supplement Harriet's piece, here are some ideas for helpful and freely available online services, environments and tools: