Bland Blog

A Cool Breeze

I felt that our meeting in Breeze on Thursday was great. Although we did not use a lot of the functions it has to offer, I can see that it offers far many more tools than your average chatroom. Being able for five of us to communicate at once from five different locations was both a convenient and efficient way to discuss our project. We got our project off to a great start as we were able to "brainstorm" ideas about preparing visual data.

We plan on using Breeze to meet again in the future and will hopefully use some of the other features it has to offer. We did use the polling feature on a few issues and that proved to be an efficient tool. Our ideas were outlined nicely in the Notes section. Perhaps in our future meetings, we can use some of the audio and visual features of Breeze by using webcams and microphones.

One thing about Breeze that is consistent with chatrooms is that people type at different speeds and you have to have a quick roaming eye to keep up with the flow of comments and enter your own. This is especially true if the other participants are fast typists. One thing this does allow you to do is to make a comment as soon as you think about it, rather than having to wait for the proper time to interject in a face-to-face meeting, so as not to interrupt. I think in this way virtual meetings such as Breeze allow more for the process of free flowing thoughts and ideas. It also allows people who have a difficult time speaking up in a group to have a "stronger" voice. Of course, one of the downfalls is not seeing body language or hearing tone inflection, but with the use of webcams and microphones, these problems can be alleviated.

All in all, I enjoyed using Breeze and hope to learn more about these types of technologies. This was pretty much my first experience with such a tool, having only participated in standard chatrooms and in ITV classes previously. As technology grows and the world gets "smaller", it will be necessary for me to become more familiar with these technologies and the tools they offer. I look forward to using Breeze again in the future.