Communication Tools

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Online Office Hours – Let’s test WizIQ

November 9th, 2007

I know that a bunch of us have tried online office hours (with varying degrees of success). Our campus uses Bb, and so my only real option for online office hours is to either use their Chat or “Virtual Lecture Hall”. Of course, it is really difficult to represent mathematical symbols in chat rooms. I have started using Jing for that, but it still makes for a choppy conversation.

As far as the “Virtual Lecture Hall” in Bb goes, it doesn’t seem to be stable. I am fairly sure that I am capable of downloading the correct Java plug-ins, and that I have every updated plug-in known to man on my computer at home, but the VLH crashes every 5 minutes or so, completely freezing up and then we all have to exit Bb, re-enter Bb, and go back to the VLH to continue. So… let’s just say I abandoned that pretty quickly.

One other gripe about this is that you can’t hold simultaneous office hours in all your classes using one of these systems because it has to be opened in a specific class. To give you an idea of how it would have to work, you could have an office hour for algebra on Monday from 7-8pm, an office hour for Algebra II on Monday from 8-9pm, and an office hour for caclulus on Monday from 9-10pm. But wouldn’t you just rather have a long, flexible office hour period where any of your students could attend (more like what we do in person)?

So… on to my little experiment… I’ve been searching for a better platform to hold office hours and I came across this platform called WizIQ in the Distance-Educator.com newsletter. Here are the features I’ve found from my initial screening:

It has a whiteboard with drawing tools.
It has mathematical symbols BUILT-IN to the system.
It has graph paper built in!
It can do audio and webcams.
It’s free for educators.
It seems to be stable. (i.e. not prone to crashing … I played for a while and you can see a couple of my screenshots)

But, to really test this as my suggested platform for online office hours, I need a whole bunch of people to log on and play at the same time and see what WizIQ can take and how it works on a variety of system configurations. If you’d like to participate in my experiment, send me an email and I’ll send you an invitation to join the “WizIQ TEST” session. The session will be held at this URL.

When? Sunday night (11/11/07), 9pm EDT (that’s 6pm for the west coast). I figure none of us have class conflicts at that time.

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Easter Egg Avatar

August 14th, 2007

I spent a pretty significant amount of time getting my avatar to properly load in to Bb7, and I fatally crashed my Bb7 Announcements page in the process (note to the wise, make sure to load avatar HTML as a non-javascript web page).

Originally, I was thinking that the avatar would just appear on the announcements screen to greet students all the time. But… I think I just had an epiphany here! The avatar should move and there should be two of them (I get five “screens” (avatar scenes) total with my subscription, and this site is using one of them, so I can easily devote two to my online calc site.

If students are participating the way that they should, then they should run into an avatar that encourages them. When there are important announcements, like when students need to schedule their tests, there should be an avatar that appears in one of their contact screens and reminds them.

In this way, the avatar announcements are like “easter eggs” to find in the online class. Kind of a “where’s waldo” for the online learning world.

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Playing with Avatars

August 12th, 2007

Well, I’m trying to get my Online Calc class up and running this week and at some point I became obsessed with getting an avatar to make the announcements in the course. Why use an avatar? Let me tell you a story…

When I was in 8th grade, I took Geometry from a guy named Mr. Allison. He had the most bizarre colored pants (to this day I can still remember Mr. Allison’s famous red pants). Every day, it was worth it to go to class just to see what color his pants would be. As a consequence, I never missed a day of class and I really did enjoy learning from the guy.

My current thinking is that if the avatar changes pretty often, the students will at log in to class often just to see if the avatar has changed. Then, when they see the avatar, it will remind them out loud (in 60 seconds or less) what is about to be due or any other important announcements (“schedule your next test” comes to mind). Is that silly? Yes. Might it work? Also yes. It could. (Really… have you tried it? Can you tell me for sure it won’t work?)

So, all evening I’ve been experimenting with the avatars on SitePal. The only major problem I’ve encountered is that all the female avatars are pretty “busty.” I think they might have all been designed for naughty websites. Or I could have a giant moose for an avatar. Imagine learning calculus from a moose! “The integral of 3x^2 is x^3+C” says the moose.

So finding appropriate attire and “sexing down” the avatar requires a bit of work. But it is doable. Once I finally created a professional looking avatar (not like the live avatar to the right), then it was time to choose a background.

Imagine your calculus instructor teaching next to a sink drain with water and debris being sucked down the hole. Hmm… I feel a problem about rotational velocity forming in my brain…

OR you could teach in front of a police car with flashing lights… cue the word problem about velocity and acceleration.

OR you could teach in front of “the matrix” (it moves)… no word problems coming to mind for that one, but I’m thinking that having a contest to write the best word problem to go with the daily background would be awesome!

There is other avatar software out there (iClone for example). But this was quick and dirty and it will have to do for now (no time to learn anything else).

Before you dismiss me and my blog as completely ridiculous, let me ask… would your next department meeting be more enjoyable if it were led by a purple-skinned bald woman with sunglasses? Yeah… that’s what I thought.

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