As the meeting commenced, so did our confusion. While Gmail's convenient "Quick Contacts" on-screen menu displayed that each us were, indeed, online and available to chat, we were unable to initiate a chat conversation that included all of the group members. Jason could chat with David. Theresa could chat with Barb. Each of the group members set about to determine whether or not Google Chat afforded users the ability to chat with multiple members, and David located a note on Gmail's help page confirming that Google chat is currently limited to one-on-one communication. From the help page:Can I set up a conference call or chat room?
No. But we're always working hard on improving Gmail, and look forward to announcing new features and improvements as they become available. You may also want to download the Google Talk client so you can get the latest features we add to our free voice calling and IM service.
As a side note, Jason was able to locate details of this process using the chat archives that Gmail retains and stores within a user's account archive as if it were another email conversation.
After approximately 5 minutes, we determined that if we were going to chat at all, we would need to use the chat feature offered by D2L. Jason notified each of the group members (via each of the individual chat sessions that were open) to log-in to D2L where we would continue our conversation.
D2L's Chat feature is accessible quite easily from the secondary menu in the D2L header. D2L's Chat allows users who are logged in to either join a general chat or create a private chat where users can control which class members are allowed to participate. Since we were the only students using chat at the time, we opted for the general chat and commenced with our conversation.
While we discussed the details of the project, we experienced a number of D2L's limitations. First, D2L chat does not provide any user feedback for the posts. For example, there was no way for either of us to know if another group member was typing a comment, reading another comment, and the like. As a result, there were a number of occasions where group members talked over one another or repeated something another member had just entered. Google chat, while limited in it's number of users allowed at a given time, provides feedback for chat members in the way of messages like "Jason is typing" or "Barb has entered text." This feature is invaluable for synchronous virtual communication, as it allows members to pause while another makes a comment or continue speaking when another person's activity has finished.
Additionally, D2L Chat's default does not distinguish visually between posts from group members. See below. Jason's name appears in bold because this screenshot was taken from his perspective.
While it is possible to manually change the way your own name appears in the chat (for others to see), having the default set so that each person's name appear in a different font color or with a unique icon to each user would aid in user's ability to more quickly identify a user and associated those comments with that member — rather than forcing users to read an entire name.
On a note related to the Gmail archiving of chats and the limitations of chatting in D2L, it does not archive chats for participants. One group member was required to cut-and-paste the text from our chat into an external document (using TextEdit) and save that document on a local computer.
No comments:
Post a Comment