Being There Now Via Phones, Classroom, and a Virtual Meeting Room

This afternoon I was a guest in a meeting happening with a grad class in a Virginia classroom, online, and from my cell in Colorado. Graduate learners in Badrul Khan's class at George Mason University have been in an online dialogue about a paper I wrote applying Badrul's Flexible E-Learning Model to a Second Life course experience I had last term (I took it as a post-grad learner.).

Badrul called me on the phone and had most of the learners together in a room. One person was participating via a virtual conferencing software. I was visiting from my cell. We all had the chance to share additional Q and A about the current paper.

Additionally, I talked to them about how the online collaboration tools we now have available are so helpful to scholars who want to share their ideas about something they are working on for a couple of great reasons: 1) Honest dialogue in community really surfaces audience issues as the piece develops; 2) In the case of designing a study, multiple sites could establish criteria together, then move to doing the studies simultaneously at different sites, bringing a study to scale much more quickly.