Expected Preparations:

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no_preparations 		 
  The units listed above are part of this course and contain important preparatory material.  
Keywords: Instructions for setting up collaboratives resources and course deliverables in the cloud.
Objectives:

  • Set up a folder for this course on Google drive.

  • Share the folder through link-sharing.

  • Author an “About me …” document with course-related information about yourself.

 Outcomes:

  • Understand the benefits and disadvantages of collaborative, cloud-based resources;

  • Author a first document to share with your instructor.

  • Learn about open-source licensing and how to apply it to your work.

Deliverables:

An About me… page that is accessible for anyone with whom you share the link.

Evaluation:

Your About me…! page will contribute to your participation marks for the month of September.

Contents

This should be the first learning unit you work with, since some deliverable files will be shared by you in this way. To coordinate your deliverables, you will set up a Google Drive folder that your instructors can access. As a first deliverable, you will author a page with information about yourself. The folder will also contain your course journal, your insights! collection, and the reports you submit for evaluation. Finally you will learn about why and how to apply open-source licenses to your work.

 

Working in a scientific context invariably means to share information with others. Cloud-based solutions such as Google Drive, make this very convenient. For example, Google Drive provides a set of integrated applications for creating and editing documents and images, and even slide shows. These documents can be collaboratively edited, or simply read by others, they are automatically backed up, they can be versioned, they can be accessed from many locations simultaneously – such as your own desktop and mobile devices or your collaborators anywhere on the planet.

In this course, we use Google Drive resources. They are free to use, it may be necessary to change our approach as we go forward. In principle, you will create a folder to contain all of your coursework, and add files as explained further below. The folder will be set up for read-only access by anyone who has the correct link, which you can share with your instructors and others, as you please1.

Set up your folder

Task…

  • Setup a Google account if you do not have one already.
  • Once you are logged in to your Google account on the Chrome browser2, simply navigate to drive.google.com. This should take you to your “Google drive”, a cloud-based storage space that integrates files and folders for a number of cloud-based apps that can be used through your browser.
  • Click on the large + New button at the top left of your page and create a New folder. Call it “<course ID>-2022 (<Your Name>)”. The folder is created and becomes visible in the directory listing. Double click its name to enter the folder.
  • Make the folder and its contents accessible:
    • Click on the drop-down triangle next to your folder name and choose Share.
    • A small window opens on which you can select General access rights. Choose * Anyone with the link**.
    • Click done.
  • Finally, copy the link and email it to your instructor.

A first document …

Task…

  • Next, click on the + New button again to create a new Google doc. Select Create shared. Your Google doc will open in a browser window with an editing interface, it is rather similar to a Word document3.
  • Double click the Untitled document file name at the top, and change it to “About me…”. This will change the file name, here, and in the directory listing.
  • Start editing.

You can use the example you find in the shared examples folder to get you started, but I am looking forward to see how you can improve on the format and write something that is meaningful to you. Feel free to discuss on the Quercus discussion forum for this course.

Open source and CC licensing.

Over the last decades, the paradigm under which we create value in science has profoundly changed. Years ago we placed numerous restrictions on the use of our insights, tried to keep control data, and thought in terms of intellectual property. Today, we think about mindshare instead. We strive to make our work maximally useful to others, and to document how we are creating this utility. This does not mean that we are simply putting everything into the public domain: certainly, people should use our ideas, but we must receive credit – acknowledgement is the currency for grant- and scholarship applications and such, which enables our future work. The right tool for this is copyright.

Everything we write and create automatically falls under our copyright, there is no special copyright tag required. To have our material reused, we can either relinquish our copyright or grant a license to reuse. Material that is created in coursework will ideally be useful elsewhere, but it is only useful if its use is permitted and regulated.

For our coursework, all material submitted for credit, including code, documentation, essays, manuals, images, lab journal entries, insights! pages etc. must be licensed with an appropriate open-source license4. This is a strict requirement for the course. For code the required license is the MIT software license, for everything else this is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The MIT license for code guarantees that there are no restrictions on re-use other than fair and visible attribution of the authors’ work. The CC license guarantees proper attribution of authorship but allows free use otherwise. Together, these licenses allow your material to be used, refactored, updated and republished and thus (hopefully) give it a fertile future life.

To insert such a license into your documents, you can simply copy the CC image from the bottom of one of the example documents (see below), and paste it into your own document. It should come with the link to the license text on the CC site.

Examples

I have prepared an example folder that you may access, and from which you can copy or download material to reuse for your own files (and improve upon).

Review

You should be familiar with the following:

Questions, comments

If in doubt, ask! If anything about this contents is not clear to you, do not proceed but ask for clarification. If you have ideas about how to make this material better, let’s hear them. We are aiming to compile a list of FAQs for all learning units, and your contributions will count towards your participation marks.

References

Page ID: FND-Cloud_collaboration

Author:
Boris Steipe ( <boris.steipe@utoronto.ca> )
Created:
2022-09-11
Last modified:
2022-09-20
Version:
1.0
Version History:
–  1.0 First version (replaces FND-Wiki-editing
Tagged with:
–  Unit
–  Live

 

[END]

  1. We use sharing-by-link rather than sharing-by-invitation, since files that we share by invitation count against all shared participants’ quota. The downside is that everyone with the link can access the files and this means you must not share the links you see here in any other context, in particular not on social media. In a lab setting, you would limit access to invited users only. Be mindful that you should not necessarily expect privacy for the files you keep in this folder.↩︎

  2. Not everything may work as expected with other browsers, we recommend to use Chrome for a consistent experience in this course.↩︎

  3. … except that you never have to save, all saving is done automatically and you will never again lose work because the program crashed.↩︎

  4. Note that the rules for academic integrity and plagiarism may entail additional restrictions. The general principle is that you must never make it appear that someone else’s ideas are originally your own.↩︎