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Post details: Short summary on EVO2010

02/02/2010

Short summary on EVO2010

I'm now in week 4 of the EVO2010 seminars. Unfortunately, some other work kept me from following all the activities in my 6 sessions that I have registered for. At the moment, I accomplish some tasks on some of the sessions if I have some free time.

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To give you a short overview on how these sessions have been organized, I start with a summary of tools. Almost all of the sessions are using ning.com as a network tool. The Ning network is a great tool to communicate with people. You just sign up for a ning network, or sign in with your existing ning-ID if you are already registered.

Creators of a ning network can set up separate spaces and activities. For example, each network member can have space to upload photos or have their own blog to share images and information with other members of the same network. It's also possible to create events, other members can decide if they want to attend an event or not. It's a little bit like facebook on steroids.

Another tool that is used to communicate with members of the same session, is yahoo groups. This is very similar to a mailing list. Each member in a yahoo group can post and reply to messages. It is possible to get all this communication mailed to your e-mail address, either individually or as a daily digest.

Another tool is a site at bpworks.com. This is a site that works like a wiki, where people can edit a page and give others in their group permission to edit them also. The site is free for personal and educational use.

One of the groups is using moodle as the only tool for the session. I personally like moodle. It allows a very clean structure and has all the necessary tools for a course. In this case, the moodle course is divided into one week sections. Each section has a short overview on the weekly goals, a discussion forum and some assignments. I like this approach because I have to login to one website only and I can find all relevant information. I can see if there are new postings in the forums and I can check them out. There is also an option to get new posts sent to your e-mail address, but I don't find this necessary in moodle if I can track unread messages on the moodle site.

My impression after the first 3 weeks

It's sometimes hard to follow the conversation and all the required tasks. In some cases, the tasks are not clear or I have to serch for download links in different places. Yahoo groups allows to set up a section for files. For example in the drama session, I had to read the instructions, went to the files sections, had to find the specified document, download the document and open it in Word (well, I don't use Word, but I could read it in Open Office).

I found a much cleaner structure in the moodle setup for the "Digital Material Preparation" session. Here I found the tasks right away in the weekly structure. The creator of the course offered several tasks that I could accomplish and there was some advice like "only attempt 2 of these" if there were a selection of 6. Each of these tasks were explained very detailed with step-by-step instructions. I believe, this is something that can be done with technical topics. For more complex learning segments (like Drama for example), it seems impossible to have a step-by-step approach like this.

Even if I'm still behind my time schedule in doing my weekly tasks, I already have learned a lot. I discovered a lot of new tools and I found that several sessions are using similar tools under different aspects. It is very encouraging to see how other people use these tools. In the discussions, I had some opportunities to help people out with technical advise for the tools that I already knew. It's much easier to learn about new resources, if there is a pool of people who can answer questions and exchange experiences.

Live meetings

Some sessions are using pure text chat via tapped.in for their meetings. This Java-based chat software looks very ancient and I found it hard to follow the chat, since it's not even using different colors to make it easier to identify each person.

The Drama session was using skype meetings at a time of day where I could not attend. Skype is limited to 25 people at a time, so they also used the skype text chat as a group chat along with the voice.

All the meetings in the virtual world (Second Life) were via voice. These were the meetings that I enjoyed most, because it's just like meeting in person and speaking to the other people in the same virtual room. The limit here is usually 40-50 people who can join a place at the same time.

Other sessions (like Multi-Literacies) used elluminate for the meetings. This software is very powerful and it uses powerpoint slides and web tours along with voice and video. The voice quality is not as excellent as with Skype or Second Life but it can handle large numbers of participants without problems.

The session "Videos for Language Learning" used Adobe Connect software which has also powerpoint, voice and video. The quality of the voice and videostream is pretty good with this software.

Some live sessions have been streamed as audio or videostream along with a text chat on the webhead's website. They use Ustream.tv for the video stream. The advantage of this technology is, that only the speakers have to be invited in a skype voice call, all others could just listen to the stream. This allows a bigger number of participants who listen and type in the chat. On the other hand, there is no presentation capability (like powerpoint slides) available, just audio and video.