Jess’ E-Learning Blog

Yes, I know… I’m spamming my weblog I thought that I should just write all these posts down in Word, and then post them throughout the week, but I’d rather put everything up now, so I can think about other things the rest of the week ( … like presentations … and reports … and session plans … ).

So, my revelation about MSN is that … It is a lifesaver when one has two group assignments due and can’t meet group mates in person because everyone is on two weeks holidays. Everyone in both of my groups are spread out all over the city, pretty much everyone has a job of some kind and then we all want to go out on Friday night to spend some time with friends. So, there has been no time for anyone to meet up in the past two weeks. Instead, we all hop on MSN when we need to and have a ’silent’ conversation online. It’s really good because we can get everything we need to get done, done, without having to worry about travelling for an hour or more each to meet up somewhere. And we can work on our assignment as we talk, adding bits of suggestions from other group members and organising work over the next week or so. I sound like a promotion for IM but I think that it worked really well for the groups I was in.

I found that there were two problems from my perspective. I tried to keep myself online for as long as possible, purely so that if someone needed to contact me, they could. The problem was that sometimes I needed to talk to someone and they weren’t online. Due to recent updates of the msn system, you can actually leave a message for someone and they will get it when they sign in, but in some situations, I needed an answer urgently and I didn’t know when or if the person would sign in.

The second problem I had was that I couldn’t go to uni, use my laptop to connect wirelessly, and have my MSN work. It has something to do with the way that uni maintains the security of my wireless connection, but it is very annoying. I found a website, meebo, where I could sign in using my MSN account and I should be able to chat as normal. I signed in and tried to chat, but it didn’t work, nobody replied to me… so I was either being ignored, or I wasn’t doing something right.

 Anyway, I think that overall, using IM during the holidays was extremely useful and i will definitely do it again. (and possibly see if I can reference this post in the synchronous technology wiki ^_^)

Just letting you know that I’ve moved some of my posts into different categories, and rearranged some of my categories and sub-categories. It was disorganised, I had some technology types in ‘elesning experiences’ and I was categorising posts from ‘elearning design’ under the technology types. And reflections from this year and last year, all under last year’s subject name

So, now I have reflections for each subject, and bits and pieces relevant to only one class under that class name. All the rest of my categories are out on their own, lonely I think it’s easier that way, even if there are more general categories and less sub-categories.

One question though: Is is bad Netiquette to reorganise like this?

Anne is going to kill me; I haven’t updated in a long time #-_-# sorry! Anyway, this is something I thought of about two weeks ago, but haven’t actually posted yet:

While I’ve been researching and reading a lot about webinars, how they work and what they’re good for, I’ve never actually participated in one before. I was having problems actually understanding the intricacies of what happens in a webinar and I was becoming confused. So, it was an extreemly eye-opening experience when I first saw the ‘inside’ of a webinar and played around in the space.

I think it goes to show that while you can read literature and learn a lot of information about an experience, unless you actually participate in the experience, you really don’t understand it. My ideas on webinars went from these grey, fuzzy, indistinct representations which my mind came up with to a high definition, brightly colored, tactile experience which I could actually use to do the assignment!