« August 2008 | Main | October 2008 »
I watched the Twitter video and read the articles but I do have concerns about the distractions that this can cause in a person's professional life. I may see if some of the others that I work with closely want to try UMChat for a while to see what happens. Keeping the train of thought going when you're on a complex project does not need one more thing to interrupt it. I know that my daughter does a lot of messaging but I have not been thrilled.
Give me a phone!
Well, this last week I was at Galaxy, presenting with 4 colleagues from across the USA so I didn't do any new UMConnect work since I could not get a connection without paying an arm and a leg.
I did do the homework from some public computers and made a LinkedIn profile. But I found it really difficult to find others to network with. I'm going to need some help on that. Must be the idiot at the keyboard.
I struggle a little with the social networking aspect of this. I think it is because there have been so many poor examples that seem to make the papers. Kids posting photos of themselves breaking the law is a prime example. The people I deal with are usually high level professionals that don't seem to have these sites. But I do know that my younger co-workers have several sites. I'll need to discuss this more with them.
This was another learning and teaching week with UMConnect. I helped my co-worker, Angie, get ready for a UMConnect conference with people across the country. She managed to get another presenter from across the country on camera to help teach others on her topic of the day. As I helped her prepare, we found that it was always important to determine if the other presenters camera has an internal program that is using their video camera that the image will then not work on UMConnect. They need to turn off the other program for UMConnect to broadcast their image.
A couple of my Galaxy Conference teammates have been so happy with our collaboration across UMConnect that they are now taking classes at their own universities on how to use their own systems.
This week for Extension 2.0, I did spend quite a bit of time looking at the online applications. I even established a website on Google sites that I am using for our handouts for the Galaxy Conference. Basecamp is a little deciving in the sense that you can get a "free account" but that is like a free credit card. You can't really use it without paying after the free trial.
I like the Picnik site. I do have a good photo editor at home but now this gives me more access to one at work. I also like the idea of the file repositories. This may be useful to use at a conference where they have computer labs with the presentations on them for downloading. If you don't have a flash drive, save it to your online storage site. I use Netfiles but at times it is hard to understand how to share these files or give people access to them. Some of these seem a little easier to use than Netfiles. I found Zamzar interesting in that it appears that it is like someone volunteering to do conversions in their spare time. I did try Google docs but how it handled some of the graphics I had in a Word document seemed weird.
Last week I discussed Presenter Only Screen. It is useful to have that when you decide to do a quick poll of those participating on the UMConnect presentation. Yesterday I wanted to ask our group if they preferred that we address an issue in person at our next meeting or on another UMConnect meeting. I was able to quickly write a poll in Presenter Mode and drag it on to the public area. 30 seconds later I received their opinion. I then hit "broadcast" and everyone could see what the total vote result was. We also used the status symbols in the attendee area to do another poll. People could choose "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" if multiple choice is not needed. But people forgot to clear their status so we saw continuous symbols during the rest of the meeting. I should have remembered that I could have used the pod options icon to select everyone and clear their status.
In this week's Wiki lesson I discovered that are good Wikis and a lot of information that is useless to a lot of people in other Wikis. I don't know if I will ever be a big participant in Wikis but at least I have a better understanding of how they are edited.