Collaboration Workshop Part 2

We're starting with the Conference tool, which allows web conferencing. We have access to Blackboard Collaborate, which at first glance, seems much, much more robust. It allows for synchronous collaboration with presentations, desktop sharing, etc. It could be used ideally for virtual office hours. One big downside is that the webinar can't be recorded and viewed at a later time.  The presenter noted that it works for smaller groups with large bandwidth.

Now, we're trying Skype. It's not working very well. In preparation for this session, everyone associated a Skype account with their profile.  When we came in today as a group, it showed everyone as "offline" and there didn't seem to be a way to get online from within Canvas. The moderator seemed to think it was a browser thing - if you are not using the most recent version of the browser, it might not work. Anyway, it's cool that you can do use Skype within Canvas, but given the the other tools, I'm not sure why I would use it.  The presenter started with an explanation of communication intimacy.  Using a tool like Skype is pretty intimate, so one would want to take care in using it.

We're wrapping up with learning scenarious, sharing ways we would use these collabotation tools in our teaching.  One tool we're using is the Collaborations tab which has integrated Google Docs and EtherPad - both of them make it easy to make collaborative documents.  Google Docs is more robust, but folks need a Google account to use it effectively.

The wrap up of the session is also fairly chaotic. I was just observing to my table colleagues that I wish the presentation would be more systematic, presenting the tool, giving examples of how it might be used, identifying the pros and cons and then playing with the tool (or maybe play first then pedagogy).  The way this was presented made it all really confusing. I suppose they assume we are all familiar with the tools, but even so, if the point of the presentation was to explore collaboration, I wish we'd done so more systematically.