Our brainstorming session can be found here.
Our Google Docs session notes.
Our group used Vyew after first trying Yugma. The advantages to using web conferencing was the ability for all three members of our group to communicate at the same time. Instead of trading e-mails back and forth where information can be easily overlooked or not sent to everyone, web conferencing gave us the ability to communicate in real time. We could easily look at our brainstorming document and share our thoughts and ideas about our project. Vyew also allowed us to webcam, talk and chat at the same time. Having this ability was nice as it allowed me to be a part of the conversation even though I am battling a chest cold right now and sound like a frog who's loosing her voice :) We also had the ability to insert comments as we went through our document so we could remember some of the finer points of our discussion and decisions we made.
In reality, this web conferencing portion of our project became more of a hassle that a useful tool. We started off by trying out Yugma which became a problem for our two Mac users. I had a problem with Yugma after initially trying out as a test for the explore session but thought I fixed it after updating my Java as they suggested. In the end that didn't work I tried accessing our room with FireFox which then caused my computer to freeze. We spent almost 40 minutes troubleshooting and trying to access our conference that we gave up and switched over to Vyew. While the program had its advantages, the big problem is that it doesn't allow you to record your session. We had two group members record the session with Camtasia (just in case) only to realize we ended up with no audio. Even after we used the web conference to discuss our project and make some final decisions, we ended up all going into Google Docs to view our project document at the same time to chat and make final edits. It seems like we used a web conference for the sake of saying we used a web conference in the end. We did have some technical difficulties with the talk tool - when multiple people have the microphone you end up with echos. We quickly learned that we had to share the mic which didn't seem to be a big problem. Vyew does allow you to download your room, but after doing this I realized that you can't see the comments made about our document and I was forced to go back to Vyew and our go back into our conference room to view them.
While web conferencing can be a useful tool - especially for communicating between group members in different locations, the process itself seemed more aggravating than helpful in the end.
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