PART A - Brainstorm Session

Our group used Vyew to complete a web conference. The advantages were obvious with many of us being in different states and we were all able to meet each other basically face to face thanks to the webcam. I could see my other three group members and hear them talking (sometimes). It was definitely easier to communicate with everyone at one time in real time and there aren’t multiple copies of the same item like there would be with email. The images were very clear and everyone’s voices were clear and easy to hear.

However, there were also some disadvantages that made the process very frustrating. We had some technical difficulties so my webcam wouldn’t patch me through and the other group members couldn’t see me. One group member could only hear the rest of us off and on and was unable to talk, which meant she had to type all of her comments. It actually ended up that she could hear us better when her webcam was off.

We also quickly found that we couldn’t all leave the talk button on to be able to talk. If you talked it would echo through someone else’s speakers and microphone if the other person left their talk button on. It was also difficult to decide who was going to talk when. We tried to devise a way to say you had something to say by raising your hand on the webcam, but not everyone’s video worked and their pictures were really small so either people were talking over themselves or there was a long pause as we all waited for someone to talk.

This would work well for someone teaching or running a meeting so that one person is talking mostly and someone could raise their hand to talk, but as a group it was hard to communicate equally.

Below is the recording of our web-conference. We ended up choosing to do a tutorial on wikis using slideshare. Check out the recording and post your own thoughts on how it worked.

http://www.screencast.com/t/7l7Ww7rxG