Week 3b – Elluminate Session

1. What were your experiences and feelings during the session?
As the tutorial only had 5 people it was a nice number of people to manage us all being able to say something and to keep up with the discussion. We did not use any formal “hands up” protocol and just spoke when we were ready. Somehow this worked despite us not being able to see each other.

I think the use of Elluminate for a discussion encouraged active listening. In face to face discussions most people are busy thinking about what they want to say and when they can say it rather than really listening to the person who is talking. I found last night that we were all listening to each other really closely and the following speaker was able to link to what previous speakers had said rather than just speaking their own mind.

The fact that no-one really understood the articles or the questions about them helped in that you didn’t have anyone ready with a predetermined answer who wanted to get their point across. The conversation developed organically from Lesley’s starting point and to Kathy’s first input.

I was positively surprised that we all engaged happily with the audio function and used it; there is something about listening to and concentrating on one person that I found really valuable.
Sometimes we were text chatting at the same time. The benefits of this were that – you could comment on what people were saying while they were talking or if you thought of something you could write it down in case your forgot it. Lesley said she prefers synchronous conversations by text and that it means she can scroll back up and re-read things as she needs. However, I would say that the disadvantage of the texting alongside someone speaking is that while you’re typing/reading you’re not really listening to the speaker. I would also say that you could end up with lots of people typing the same thing at the same time rather than letting one person speak/type one response, and then forming your response on the basis of that first response and so on.

I think the combination of both was good. The text gives those who were nervous of speaking or without a microphone chance to contribute.

One of the Simon’s, at the end, said how by the end he was much more comfortable at hitting the microphone key than he was at the start.

Lesley also said that she doesn’t like to impose any protocols on a group and likes to see it develop naturally. Does this mean that as a group we should set our own protocols? I wonder what everyone else thinks. The discussion last night flowed really smoothly, we even ran out of time, but we did not have a nominated or self-selected chair to keep things moving and keep us to the point, we did not have a speaking order until towards the end when we did start to raise hands to dictate the order of speaking. In f2f discussions body language tends to dictate the natural leaders unless a tutor delegates.

In one of her forum postings Lesley said that Lyceum was less democratic than Elluminate. I have no idea what this means, however by having no leader in yesterday’s discussion it did feel very democratic. We moved forward at a nice pace, we were able to gauge ourselves when to move on but I still think there is a role for a chair just to ensure we keep to the time limits and reach the desired outcomes.

I did notice that the person’s name appeared just above my microphone button when they were speaking so this is a good way of knowing who is speaking, the name goes when they switch their microphone off so you know they’ve finished as you don’t necessarily have the visual clues of someone pausing v. Someone finishing.

2. What did you learn about the Bayne chapter itself?
That everyone was confused by the high level of academic writing in the article and no one was sure how it fitted into e-learning or our roles. It was a very abstract article, with little way of understanding how the cyber identity issue was relevant. However, I was by the end of the discussion able to see how I had changed my cyber identity over the years and how I do have different identities in different forums. Interestingly I didn’t think I was different when we began the discussion. I realised that I used to use a nickname, e.g. for my eBay screen name, but when I started using formal social networking and learning forums I have since signed up to everything as Emma Nugent. After all that’s who I am.

However, in the online diet forums I partake in, I am Livia’smum and not Emma Nugent, this must say something about my need to be professional/formal in some contexts, and informal and “not me” in others. I am labelling myself by my associations with others/priorities in life and not by who I am. But then this has nothing to do with cyber space – I always think it’s strange that when we introduce ourselves and say a bit about ourselves it’s always what we do for a living that comes first, generally, and not WHO we really are.

Were some parts of the session more useful than others?
The discussion about cyber identity really helped me to realise how it applies to me over the years.

3. Can you come to any views about the pros and cons of using Elluminate for this task?
Pros – able to discuss it with others, find out how others think, get support, feel less isolated, help develop understanding through participation, will stimulate further discussion in the forums, whiteboards helped focus our attention and give us a visual stimulus to concentrate on, verbal and text chatting added to the participation, making you feel part of a community more than the forums, breaking down another barrier of distance.

Cons – not having everyone there, now the discussions in the forums are going to move forward at different paces and the session on Sunday will probably be quite different to the one last night. Time limited.

Compared to online forums – I think that these live sessions will add value to the forums, by having “met” people in real-time it breaks down the barriers and may make conversation in the forums more lucid. Hmmm, on our courses we are saying that there is no need for the f2f induction day for the DL MBA students – what does it really add. Perhaps I’m wrong at work, perhaps it does add a lot, if it gets the students more comfortable and confident at communicating online

6. How do you use these tools in your context?
We are already using a similar tool and my experiences as a student using Elluminate on this course certainly feed into me developing more types of sessions with our tool. We’ve only had our tool a year, and only used it for intro and revision sessions, I would not say that it’s been used for learning yet.