There is Something Weird....

I know that this is probably Twitter material rather than a blog post, but I do not tweet, so here goes. There is something weird about those live/online events where a group of people gather in a room and watch/hear a presenter with a bunch of Powerpoint slides glide in front of them on a big screen. I am currently at the Educause ELI focus group conducted here at JMU through Adobe Connect. I am hoping for some lively face to face discussions with the people in the room, after the presentation is over.  I am wondering whether a better way for these types of events would not be a live video conference via Skype of some such application, rather than the sound/Powerpoint combination. Oh, and by the way, the topic of the current presentation is assessment of student work online. Also, it seems to me that people who give talks about, essentially, online instructional design, should design more engaging visual presentations than slide after slide of bullet point lists.

Now, to the substance of the talk. A significant part of the talk was dedicated to building trust among collaborating learners. I think this is a topic that is often overlooked in literature, with many scholars, especially in rhetoric and composition, tending to think about collaboration as this "warm and fuzzy" process in which everyone agrees on everything and things go smoothly. I am glad that this speaker mentions the notion that collaborating learners and writers "do not have to like one another" and still get the work done. Conflict and conflict resolution are important parts of the collaborative process. What is even more timely, that one of my graduate students who is also present at this session, jut blogged about this on our class's website.