NPR had a story Monday about some colleges and universities switching their e-mail systems to Gmail. The story cites cost-saving and better features as advantages of such a move. I think there is another very good reason why universities should give all their students and employees Gmail accounts: It would help improve communication, encourage collaboration, and make people think about projects in more nimble terms.

From working in a university setting for the past three years, here’s what I’ve learned:

• Communication between departments on a college campus, or even just between units within the same department, sucks. People often don’t know what’s going on outside of the immediate circle of individuals and units they deal with on a daily basis. Also, you either don’t get enough information about something, due to the lack of a clear channel of communication, or you get the same piece of information multiple times due to redundant channels such as the multiple listservs one might be on.
• The technology for on-campus communication sucks as well. For instance, a lot of the faculty and staff I’ve come across use Blackboard as a group-communication tool. While I’m sure Blackboard is fine for instructors to share material with students and such — the niche it was designed to serve — it really doesn’t measure up as a mass communication tool. For one thing, it’s closed. There’s no way to push information out from Blackboard. For another, it’s not designed to be a social network. Yet people on campus use it for those purposes because, frankly, that’s the one tool that everyone on campus have access to. Of course, collaborators off campus can’t get into your campus’ Blackboard site, so that necessitates creating yet another location for sharing information with off-campus individuals, which means when you post or update one piece of information — say a set of research guidelines — you might have to update it in several locations, and chances are you’ll forget at least one of them.
• Technology-related projects on campuses usually tend to be big, top-down, wide-ranging efforts trying to meet the needs of a million different interests. Unsurprisingly, those qualities invariably make the end product a mediocre solution for any one of those interests, and you end up with some cumbersome system that’s buggy, took forever to implement, and will take forever to upgrade. And you’re stuck with it because you sank a ton of money and resources into implementing it, and if you switch systems, chances are you’ll end up with a replacement that’s cumbersome, buggy, took forever to implement, and will take forever to upgrade.

That’s where Google comes in. For starters, Gmail is likely better than most campus mail systems and, of course, it’s free. However, to me, the e-mail component is really just a side benefit. The main advantage is that it will get everyone on campus onto Google and give everyone access to the same set of terrific tools that Google offers, which is ideal for collaboration. There have been many times during my work when I thought, “Google Docs or Google Wave would be perfect for something like this,” only to have it followed by “but everyone would need to have a Google account.”

Imagine just a few advantages of a campus where everyone is using Google’s applications:

• On-campus collaboration will reach a new level with Wave.
• E-mailing files around will be replaced by sharing them on Google Docs.
• Every faculty member will have their own space for hosting and sharing files (Docs), photos (Picasa), and videos (YouTube) related to their work, and it’s easy to make them public if the researcher chooses to do so.
• Faculty members would be able to easily create decent-looking lab pages and wikis with Google Sites, and if they want to blog, they basically already have a Blogger account.
• Various units on campus can create Google maps related to events and research, and those can be compiled into content-rich, multi-layered campus maps.
• Event listings from every department on campus can be easily compiled, filtered, and shared with the public. Oh one can only dream.

The other advantage is that Google’s apps are easy to implement. True, they may not be as powerful as some special proprietary programs for certain specific needs, but what they are is an excellent 80 percent solution that can be quickly deployed and, if need be, scrapped without significant investment of time or resources. That’s a departure from a lot of the current software being used on college campuses, which are cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming to develop. Perhaps working in such an environment would encourage people to approach projects differently — think small, nimble, and bottom-up, and not be afraid to experiment, because the cost of a failed experiment is so low. Furthermore, the open nature of Google’s platform could help change the culture on campuses, where people’s first inclination is still often to hold on to information rather than sharing it, either with collaborators or the general public.

That said, I can also see some concerns with turning over all the key communication functions on your campus to one company. To a degree, I share those concerns, too, especially since part of me thinks one day Google is going to push a button and something like this will happen. Still, there’s a huge upside to getting a college campus onto a nimble, open (and free) platform. And hey, if Google does turn out to be evil, you can easily ditch its set of tools and you would have suffered relatively little financial loss.