If you've been at SC&I for more than a week, you have probably become acquainted with the oft-dreaded group project.  Here are some freely available online tools that can help you collaborate with your group members and skip that trip to campus.  Good luck with those projects!

• Would you like to collect all the online resources for your group in one spot where everyone can access them?  Try a social bookmarking service like Delicious.  By setting up an account for your group, you can collect all your online sources in one place, which is very handy when it's time to do the Works Cited page.  It's also a quick and easy way to communicate with each other -- you can write notes in the description, like "will this work for you?" or "I thought this would be good for the biography part of the project."   Hint: Delicious bookmarks are also searchable, so if you need information on a topic, why not start your search there?  More filtered than Google, you'll get results that other people have decided were relevant to your search terms.  Happy hunting!

• Do you need to hand in a cohesive product from your group?  Test drive Google docs.  More than one person can edit the document at the same time, and you can upload documents from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.  Documents can be downloaded in a variety of formats, and you have control over whether people can view or edit your document.  Rutgers even has its own Google docs environment...check it out!

• Need to have a get-together?  Plan a virtual one!  E-mail takes too long, and you never know if you'll have enough bars for a phone call.  Try using Instant Messaging (IM).  Meebo is a great IM service that is hosted on the web, so you don't have to download any software.  Once you set up your account, you can IM from any computer with an internet connection.  Sweet!

Bonus tool:  TinyURL can shrink those giant URLs and make them easy to send in e-mails or during chats.  TinyURLs are not generally appropriate for reference citations.  Check the appropriate style manual for proper formatting in your final paper.