Interaction Grid

The biggest goals for me in selecting technologies for my course were:

1. Create an effective community of practice in a non-collocated classroom.
   
2. Create interaction with the "real world" outside of the classroom.
3. Create opportunities for synchronous and asynchronous interaction.
4. Create opportunities for presentation, discussion, and studio work.
   
5. Create a large breadth of opportunity for students to consult with me throughout the course.
   
6. Guide students to interact with technologies for digital compositions in new ways that are both exciting and challenging.

Interaction Grid on Prezi

I chose technologies that would afford a great deal of flexibility in possibilities for interaction. GoToMeeting, for example, affords synchronous, non-collocated presentations from many different presenters (allowing for class presentations as well as instructor presentations), synchronous, non-collocated conferences with a shared computer screen so that you can look at the same thing at the same time; and synchronous, non-collocated studio work environments.

GoToMeeting, however, does not afford the best possibilities for large group discussion due to the lack of visual cues to moderate the discussion through seeing who your talking to and taking turns. Discussion in GoToMeeting would have to involve a policy of clicking the "raise hand" button in order to speak. This could be beneficial if one wanted to facilitate an orderly discussion but does not allow the discussion to flow smoothly. Free-flowing synchronous, non-collocated discussion is better afforded by Convore. Convore allows full engagement in discussion, even better in some ways than face to face class discussion. Students are able to throw their ideas out as they come into their heads and respond instantly to other students, meaning that multiple topics can pop up at the same time. The fact that students can read through the transcripts afterward to make sure that they didn't miss anything ensures that no one is worried about taking notes or doing anything other than engaging in the conversation. Even though people may "talk" over one another, the stored record of conversation enables sorting through the potential confusion of such a discussion. With its stored conversation records, Convore also affords me the opportunity to "check in" on studio meetings for group project work to observe participation levels and the groups' effectiveness during meetings.

A variety of the technologies used in the class facilitate communication with the world outside of the classroom, allowing students to craft their projects for "real" audiences. These include the individual student blogs in Blogger, the class wiki created in PB Works for project #2, Xtranormal movies, and twitter. The goal in choosing these technologies was to create a sense of our class as part of a broader community creating pieces of digital communication, rather than a small group of people in a class "bubble."

The most important goal was to create a strong and open community of practice in a non-collocated classroom through extensive amounts of interaction between everyone in the class. This is enabled through the synchronous class meetings in GoToMeeting and Convore, commenting on peer blog posts, participating in ELI peer review, building a class wiki in PB Works, and the final group project using student Convore, Google Docs, and student chosen technologies. I also wanted to ensure that students had as much ability to contact me as possible. This is enabled asynchronously through Email and Twitter and synchronously through Skype, Aim, Convore, and GoToMeeting. Easy conference scheduling is afforded through the tungle.me.