Summer Silliness

Norma is back but gone incognito, changing her name to Roberta. ;-)

Really all we were doing was testing ooVoo with multiple people in the call. Jill and Norma (and Roberta) came in via a browser. I have the pay version of ooVoo that allows others to not need the client. It looks pretty good from my point of view. Norma and Jill were in the same room, not a recommended practice, so there might have been some feedback from that.

First Session with Galen

Galen Rafferty is a student in our Professional MBA Program here. He is also a staff member for the CIC, which is how I got to know him. He is almost ready to graduate but needed one more course. So he and I agreed that I would mentor him through an independent study course that focuses on a work related interest but that is suitable for his program of study. Galen has a blog to record his current thinking and he will be producing a paper for this course. My role is more as a cheer leader and outside ear than as an expert in Galen's project - I'm not, though I've got some relevant experience from work so I can chime in now and then based on that.

We've decided to do live sessions in ooVoo so the sessions can be recorded and I can then use those for my work. I don't think we've yet nailed it as to how to hold these online sessions, but this sort of mentoring I'd expect to become a more regular part of people's professional development. So I want to showcase it here. The content might be of interest in its own right. I'm showing it for the style of interaction. Enjoy!

ooVoo Chat with Mike Dyer

Mike is the instructor in the Intro to Finance course in the College of Business. It is a large course with several hundred students per semester. We're trying a Blended version in the fall where one hour of lecture per week is replaced by online content. The semester starts in about two and a half weeks and this brief chat is meant to take a pulse reading before we get into the thick of it.

ooVoo Chat with Shelli Fowler

In this chat Shelli and I cover first the nuts and bolts of using ooVoo and the cost of recording, then we turn to how it might work to use this for a guest speaker, and we wrap up with a discussion about students multiprocessing at their computer and whether students will view this type of content. It was really helpful for that part that Peter Doolittle from Virginia Tech had spoken here last January, because he did a demo on the multi-tasking issue, that said it just ain't so. So in doing one of these chats with a guest speaker, one might be tempted to make the conversation more complex to challenge the audience to pay attention. But that cuts against the grain of my own thinking that good instruction, and elegant presentation more broadly, should make the hard things seem simple, not vice versa.

ooVoo Chat with Blaire Bundy

Blaire works for Academic Technology@DoIT at University of Wisconsin and is a colleague from the CIC Learning Technology Group. Our conversation was mostly about using video interviews for generating content that learning technologists would promote, in lieu of face to face interviews for the same sort of content.

ooVoo Chat with Jim Witte

Jim was nice enough to devote some time for this conversation, some of which covers his own use of desktop video conferencing.