- Image by Keith1999 via Flickr
Photo shows where I went last weekend – Cardingmill Valley in the LongMynd (south shropshire hills), nothng to do with blog post, just pretty!
I emailed some queries to tutor last night and had a useful Elluminate chat with Frauke. Having another online get together tomorrow morning (Sunday) at 9am.
Reflections on Elluminate first – frustration is listening to someone speak and sat him umming, and nodding, laughing etc but not being able to convey this to the person talking unless I sit and type in my body language/visual clues. PLenty of literature points this out too. But really what does this take away from the experience. When it’s my turn to speak, I just have to make sure I convey those feelings back to the other person verbally. I think this helps you develop communication skills and awareness of your own responses to what others say.
Other than that, it is really useful to talk to someone in realtime, but why don’t we just use the phone? WEll Elluminate allows more people to come, and if we wanted we can use the whiteboard and if someone hasn’t got a microphone, they can type in their communications (ok skype does that too). But I think I’m right in saying Skype doesn’t allow many users at one time. Correct me if I’m wrong.
On to the ECA
Frauke explained her approach to part A being that she has found evidence of use of her two chosen technologies (incidently the same 2 I’m doing, e-conferencing and Blogs) in the context she knows (Language teaching) and then is using this to help her make her recommendations for language teaching.
My research to date had been very broad, I hadn’t thought of just looking in my context (Business education) and had just lots of elearning generalist evidence. However, woke up this morning and did some searches of blogging in business studies and found 2 x 2009 articles that I can use.
I asked my tutor and she recommended that I make sure I identify any similarities with any evidence uses and map these to my own context. More similiarities = higher confidence about achiving the outcomes. Make sure I also acknowledge the differences.
Regarding how to write it, she said the First person was perfectly acceptable- that’s great, but could be challenge as it’s a long time since I’ve written a formal piece of work in the first person (other than in exams).
I also told her about my new idea for the learning activitiy I’m going to do, and she liked it saying that is was particularly good as it was work relevant and would have real benefits.
Now just got to put pen to paper and get writing….unfortunately I lost the afternoon as I went to bed at 1pm with a bad headache and neither I or Livvy woke up til 5!
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Regarding your session on Elluminate, we (Barbara’s group) have abandoned Elluminate in favour of Skype. The thing Skype cannot apparently do is to (i) have breakout rooms and (ii) have white boards to jointly show stuff. But none of us so far have missed this functionality.
Why didn’t you like Elluminate? What were your reasons for doing this?
By the way, I heard that Skype is going to introduce these tools soon, so what will the vendors do then. Rely on the fact that we’ve already invested loads of time in training up our tutors to use your econference software of choice, and don’t want to retrain them in a new technology?
Personally I don’t like Elluminate because it is so clumsy. The main thing that most of us like about Skype is the fact that we can have a ‘normal’ conversation, that is all of us can speak at the same time, ie we don’t have to take artificial turns in speaking. Those of us doing this appear to be familiar with Skype. There’s an IM section of it so you can still do thumbs up or down, or smileys etc if you want to do that too. If a white board were necessary, I guess we could drum up a third party app (real PLE stuff).
Many of us have had problems just trying to get Elluminate to work too. So the appeal for Skype is that it just seems very easy to use right out the box.