March 29, Post

I found chapter 8 very interesting because I personally have not thought about teaching an online team environment. I think when approaching a task such as this that an instructor should first and foremost find away to develop trust among the team members. Chapter 8 mentioned that a group meet face-to-face and that allowed each member an opportunity to “get to know” or “trust” each other, but if meeting face-to-face is not an option than perhaps group synchronous chat meetings with webcams would suffice. I would have like the author to explore or even mention using webcams. Once member trust each a group hierarchy should be established between the learners, so that delegation of the task can be assigned.

Learners should be encouraged to take advantage of community discussion forums by scheduling extra meeting times, if necessary. The types of meeting can include group achievements, failures, leaderships, and so on. Group achievements should be celebrated. If it is possible for the group members to celebrate at a physical location for beer and pizza “DO IT!” If not find other creative ways for celebrations to take place. Failures need to be addressed immediately. The instructor should be included in these meeting to provide prompting for “just in time learning.” A failure could possible wither trust between group members.

LOVE the virtual class chatquette; I cannot express the frustrations that I have had in many chat rooms. The protocols that the chatquette offers seems easy to learn and implement into chat room discussions. The protocol of virtual class chatquette works by using “?”, “!”, “///”, and others to express oneself. Each sign has a different meaning such as, “?” is interpreted as “you want to ask a question” and “!” means “you want to make a comment.”

Anderson & Elloumi’s chat protocol is very similar to Smiths’, but Smith’s protocol is more defined because of the symbols used. However, most of Anderson & Elloumi’s chat protocol can be and should be implemented in any chat discussions. One should always consider the feelings of other group members and many of Anderson & Elloumi’s protocols express that. I think that if we were to mix Smith’s symbols and Anderson & Elloumi’s chat etiquette into our D2L virtual environment; our chat discussions can be more focused on content.

Lori mentioned that the moderator and students should have different colors for there names. That way every member in the chat room can be identified. This would not suite somebody such as who cannot tell the difference between certain shades of color. Maybe, someone would be assigned a light shade of yellow, which would be very hard to read. Plus, we do not know if any of our classmates are colorblind. A colorblind person may not be able to see red, so therefore he/she would not be able to read the text at all. However, I do agree that a system should be put in place for easy identification of group members and moderator. Perhaps, every learner and moderator can be assigned a 50X50 jpegs for identification purposes (a head shot). I wonder if it would also make the chat more personal because you see a picture of the person that you are chatting with.