Comments on: Lit Review: Is it Live or is it Memorex? Students’ Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication with Scientists

By: Janine Lim

Janine Lim — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:55:10 +0000

Thanks for these great comments, Ken. I think you’ve made some excellent points.

By: Ken Conn

Ken Conn — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:37:18 +0000

Two thoughts came to my mind when reading this post and the comments:

1) The informality of the questions coming from the synchronous group is related to the immediate feedback they can receive. They aren’t really given time to process and reflect what they are seeing and trying to understand. It is like when you present to a group and ask if there are any questions. Generally ten seconds of silence follows. This is why I think the A.S.K. process is so important and powerful for these types of videoconferencing experiences. It builds the processing time in advance so the live interaction has more value to both the questioner and interviewee.

2) As far as why have face-to-face meetings go, it is so everyone involved makes time to review the information together. If you just post it and tell everyone to make sure they review it, some people will and some people won’t. The immediacy of it lessens because there are other things that require a specific time line to complete. In my experience, very few people will schedule time to review information that is just posted and will coast by when it comes to using it.

By: Does a screwdriver make a good hammer? | VC Rox

Does a screwdriver make a good hammer? | VC Rox — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:05:16 +0000

[...] forward to her latest post on interacting with scientists, which made me think of how we have to know the purpose of using any technology or Web 2.0 tool [...]

By: Janine Lim

Janine Lim — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:01:11 +0000

That’s a great question about your user group. Why do we meet face to face? I’m thinking of statewide meetings that “have” to be face to face; when they are just a “regurgitation” of information. What about principals meetings? etc. etc. that happen at our service agencies. Surely there is a reason for getting together face to face. There’s something to the camaraderie at least.

I think you’re on to something here, Roxanne. And isn’t integrating technology in the curriculum really all about choosing the right tool for the learning objectives? For that matter, good teaching is about choosing the experiences that will best meet the learning goals and the needs of the kids.

Hmm. We must keep thinking about this!

By: Roxanne Glaser

Roxanne Glaser — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:30:06 +0000

You know what this reminds me of?

The conversation that always occurs around Web 2.0 technologies that one of the most important aspects of them is knowing when to use which one. Could that thought process be part of this thinking also? Sometimes asynchronous is best and sometimes synchronous is best and we have to know when the “painfulness of scheduling” the synchronous connections is worth it…and which tools to use for successful asynchronous.

This actually entered my mind today as I was putting together resources for our UserGroup meeting. If I make a page with all the links, why do I need to meet face-to-face, synchronously with my group? What topics really need to be discussed f2f and which can just be referenced later?