Internet Outage...

It has been a long time between posts....mostly due to limited internet access (through phone and Internet Cafe/Kiosks!)

But now back on track....

Skype Session with "Time Machine" Group

Quite a surprise for me was the usefulness of Skype for a collaborative session yesterday. A surprise because of the usefulness due to it's simplicity...let me explain...

Three of us were in the conversation (Janet, Joyce and I) and we tried a few scenarios (typing, different conversations, MSN etc) before we stuck with a hosted conversation in Skype. Once were were connected and all on the same page the conversation flowed and the technology fell into the background...as is ideal.

We played with a bunch of tools, including Skribble (http://www.skrbl.com) and talked about where we are at in terms of our facilitated pages...a great conversation which highlighted the usefulness of a "simple" and common tool as Skype...

Chris :-)

Making progress again....

Well I have had tro take a back step with my facilitated page...I am disappointed with not being able to use YackPAck as a tool for collaboration, and as such, I think the valueo f the facilitated page will be reduced, even in the sense that people will have to read through the page to get an idea of it and then register in order to have a go...and all I would be doing is putting much of the content discussed on the page into the YackPack environment...oh well, trying something fancy is not always worth it...

But moving forward now, I have started working on the proposal for Assignment 2, I am happy about that and this course has changed my thinking about the usefulness of Wikis. However, I am a big fan of Moodle and staying within the "main" learning environment, and this course has highlighted this.

I am a little frustrated with trying to keep up with the course is so many different learning environments...don't get me wrong, I enjoy the idea of looking at all this new technology and how it can be used to create better learning environments, but I am also struggling to keep up with so many environments in order to keep up with the course...

One example is that I am finding it hard to strike the right balance between getting into Twitter in order to make valid contributions to facilitated pages, when I need to do the same for FaceBook, Skype, MSN, Wimba, KnowledgeGarden and Moodle...

So that is where I am at now...that said, I am feeling much better now that I am starting to work on the major assignment...

Chris :-)

More frustration...going to the next loweer level...

Trying to put into the Wiki some of the work that I have been doing to try and gets ome feedback on it, but no luck...going for a very basic setup now...must get something done to this page....feeling mighty frustrated now, but need to look further ahead! Change the plan...very disappointing...

Chris :-(

Frustration setting in....might be time to move on...

Well I have spent a number of hours in 3 sessiosn trying to work out how to get YackPack working within a Wiki...but because Wikis don't take HTML (from what I can find out...) this is becoming almost an impossibility...

I found a link to Richard Hawkings Facilitated page (from Sem 2 2006) and have copied and modified the code from his page (which is a simple SWF file, but this is not allowing me all the functions that YackPack requires.

I have now resolved to have a link to YackPack and also just invite people along, at least then it will also work at the full speed.

I need to get going on the other stuff related to YackPack and not get caught up in the technical guff....

Chris :-|