Reflection on IT648 Group Project One

Our group set the time to have met and collaborated on Group Project One this week. The project was to experience Google's some new services such as Google chat based on Gmail, and play with it a little bit to see whether and how it could be used in our educational activities.

Our worked turned out to be pretty good, although there were some problems. The chatting went very smoothly, it was synchronous, and message was sent to each other without any delay. At first Roslyn, Tim and I had been chatting with each other and later other group members joined. We tried different things like one-to-one chat, group chat and we also tried video and audio chat, although that did not get to work eventually. We did some trouble-shooting and our estimate was because the software/driver Google requires to install was incompatible with some of our computer systems. Also, there are no video/audio chatting options in the Group chat Window.

As to the usage in Education, we reached some consensus about Google chats Educational use. To me, I have been interested in language teaching and learning all the time, so the first question I thought about was how Google chat could be used to facilitate international students’ English learning. The immediate thing came to my mind was to use Google chat connect students from different countries in different culture and educational settings, how ever, this feature of Google chat itself does not stands out compared with other international chatting softwares such Skype. However, Google chat is surprisingly bounded to its Email service, such combination of both synchronous and asynchronous feature was its highlights, which made communication more efficient, meanwhile, its recording functions is more convenient than other chatting softwares if users need to review their chatting records to assess their language practice.

Tim generalized our discussed points to a concise list on its problem, vantage and usage, and I added some on it before Roslyn asked us to assemble our scholarly paragraphs into the final documents. I post the concise list we first devised here as the reflection points on this project:

Good points:

• Convenient/always available from any web browser via Gmail, no downloading required (for text chat);
• An Email-communication revolution, combined functions of Email, listserv, IM, and SNS into one;
• Chat works pretty well;
• Record keeping, convenient for notes taking;
• It is easy and convenient for instructor to find out who are active and who are silent in a online discussion class.

Problems:

• It's easy to get confused with several windows going at the same time, especially if they have some of the same people talking in them;
• Inviting could be confusing (hard to remember who was invited and who started the chat. Also, having to scroll up to the top is not a very elegant solution, especially if the chat has been going on for a long time)
• Not well suited to having large numbers of people chatting at once (a dedicated chat program like Xchat does that better).
• Had trouble getting Voice and Video to work (the software wouldn't install on Tim's older XP machine).
• Users have to wait for responses sometimes, and some users got off automatically occasionally and have to be invited again.

Uses:

• Small group discussions (especially for groups who are working on a project together)
• Virtual office hours (for one-on-one or small group conferences)
• Discussion class on a certain topic for a small class

Artifacts: Project One Report