Saturday, 02-26-2011 Where to Begin?

Another interesting week in experiencing emerging technologies!

This week I worked with Tia and Pete to create our module on Moodle, a course management software, using MovieMaker, later changed to iMovie. We knew from the beginning that we weren't supposed to spend too much time on it so our mantra was "get in, get it done, get out."

In hindsight it was a prototypical comedy of errors. What could have gone wrong, did go wrong. We thought we were on top of something but a roadblock would arise. For me it wasn't fun at all. It was slog, slog, slog. Try one thing, fail. Try another thing, fail. Give that thing up. Find another tool. Deadline passes. Contact Dr. Bert. Stress.

We chose to do a divide and conquer method from the beginning which was, one of us selects and researches the tool, one of us writes up the Wiki info, all of us script and contribute to screenshots, and one of us puts together in video because of the strengths we have. Maybe that was our mistake going into the project. I don't know.

We started off trying to create original Moodle sites that required downloading software. Two of us had PCs and one had a MAC and we didn't realize that there were different versions of Moodle available. We all tried to switch to PC to be consistent. Downloading the software got extremely technical and time-consuming so we eventually decided to use the Moodle demo site.

Then two of us switched to MAC because the person who was going to put the video together was a MAC person. Then we had problems using Screencast with double extensions not being able to be opened via Dropbox.

So what did we end up doing eventually? One team member who had the Mac only chatted with the member who had both a PC and a MAC. The member who had a PC and MAC had the chat box open on the PC while the team member walked through how to do what needed doing on the MAC. They then stayed online with each other to confirm that the Dropbox items were coming through realtime in a format that could be used with iMovie.

What we tried initially was asynchronous use of technology using the skills and knowledge sets we each had individually. This meant that time passed between subsequent contact with team members to determine whether the elements of the module were successful or not. A synchronous chat session was finally necessary to ensure that elements were available.

I also think this assignment was difficult for our team because two of us, one of them being me, has very little online video skills.

I know this should not have been hard at all to do. I think the other thing was that we were trying really hard not to use any software that we already know how to use but to try some new things.

Anyway, it was a frustrating week. Thanks for "listening". Kim