A wild ride

It has been quite a crazy semester, between taking 9 hours, working as a research assistant, searching for a job for the fall, applying for the PhD program and taking comps. I just noticed I've neglected the blogging part of IT648.

Well, here goes:

I've been learning a lot this summer. Particularly, I've found the online communication tools to be very interesting.

I worked with a really good group (Rongfei, Eloise, Charity, Roslyn, and myself) when we were exploring these tools. A couple of weeks ago, we tried out the Wimba Liveclassroom that's available through Blackboard. One thing I liked about it was that you could easily participate even if you lacked a video camera, and you could still see and hear what others said or did, even if you were limited to communicating through texts. I found that to be very convenient, especially when you have different students with different connection speeds and different types of hardware available.

The next week, we tried out four different online tools: two synchronous and two asynchronous. We tried out Wikispaces, which I was already familiar with (and which I suggested). I find Wikispaces to be of great use, because you can all edit it, but it records what changes have been done and who made them, allowing you to not only update information, but grade group work by checking exactly who has done what, and when they did it. Tapingya was interesting, but I struggled to find much use for it (that's the story of the Internet, sometimes). Tokbox was cool, especially the way you could "post" short video messages while communicating via text, voice, or video.

I loved Ning. It's like being able to set up a class website or social network site, with built-in chat function, all by yourself. It's a great resource for the online component of a class that isn't going to be using WebCT/Blackboard.

Oops. I see that I should have made this two posts. I'll add a second post later on, with the Project 3 information and links.

Artifact: Group Three Project Two