August 22 another Wednesday night and another set of problems with voice based chat and the virtual classroom

Last Wednesday the 22 August started sort of OK with some of us in the Virtual clasroom of blackboard and only about three unable to get in. It also eventually ended quite well with everyone except Michael able to access the text based aspect of Skype. But in between the voice based component of Skype again led to some confusion and brought to the surface the technical issues of the difference between Skypecasting and conference calling.

In addition it is also worth noticing that the text based environment of Skype has so far been the most successful for the largest number of students so far - even though Michael had problems with it not being installed on the university's computers. I is probably the environment that we will now continue to use as the fall back environment for chat.

But first we need to note that even the starting point last Wednesday in the text and whiteboard based virtual classroom of Blackboard was a little disappointing in that not all of the class could access thats environment. The issue mentioned on the first night of browser compatibility and with a java player that might have to updated ( Debbie noted this last Wednesday that her problems with the Blackboard VC were solved by downloading and installing the new java player that plugged in automatically to her browser on install. Now I still do not know whether Debbie's solution will work for Christine or for Sam who both seem not to have access and it is let me hasten to add not their fault or indeed mine. The university is paying the Blackboard company enormous amoundt of money and there are a very expensive team of University staff employed to make sure the Learning management system works smoothly> Browser and java player issues are very basic issues that should be resolved very early in an implementation of a system such as this so all I can say in relation to the LMS and the lack of access to the VC is I will look into getting some some of that technical support that is being paid for to get this resolved. But the thing worth noting is that it does not matter how much you pay you still seem to have technical issues - money does not solve all problems it seems.

So the free text based chat environment of Skype now looks like it is more accessible than the Blackboard virtual classroom environment that the university is paying for.

Now for the middle bit of the chat last Wednesday which was again attempting to get the voice based aspects of Skype working for more than 9 users it is the case that as part of this subject's attempt ro evaluate online technologies everyone should be aware that a Skypecast is a different technology to the Skype voice based conference call. It may appear that the two are designed to achieve the same outcome however the as we know from the week before the conference call can only have 9 participants and all others are excluded. WHereas the documentation for Skypecast says you can get at least 100 participants to at least hear what is going on.

This Skypecast thing would have been good had it worked and the reason it did not work was that it requires the most recent addition of Skype to be installed on all the computers accessing the Skypecast. The fact that only Debbie got in attests to how recent the install has to be - only she and i were in the Skypecast.

The voice based conference calling in Skype was a first level fall back position which worked upto a point in so far as I hosted and called as many as I could to the conference which immediately confused people who answered the unexpected invitation from me and then began a group conversation that I could hear but could not participate in possibly because i also had open my Skypecast environment which i was also hosting.

Despite my not being there in voice or perhaps because I was not "socially present" as a voice there seemed to be quite lively discussion and there was a lot of assistance and explaining that was going on which I could hear but not respond to except in the text based environment of Skype. i think people enjoyed hearing each other and that did add a little more "social presence" for those able to participate fully.

Later on just going to the text based Skype there was still a lot gong on and alot of assisitance and suggestions about what was working and what was not and it wven led to discussions of whether video conferencing would add or detract from learning online good stuff really I will leave it open for your comments to this now if there are any observations you would like to make press the Comments word below and type in what you think was going on or ways to avoid some of the issues we faced.