The Tools Team
Topic Owners: Jason + Michelle
"[Videoconferencing] is not just the next thing. It's better than being there." - Rick Shriner of Apple, talking about "Quicktime Conferencing" in 1995.
It's 14 years later, and - while we've augmented IIF with a course wiki and additional high-tech tools each week - we all still bother to get together in person for two hours a week, and we still expend effort and money to bring outside guests to our classroom each week. But, while we continue to meet in the real world, we do use a lot of online tools to augment these interactions, so our job is to occassionally step back and examine the critical questions of how the tools we are using add to the in-person experience, detract from it, or go beyond it. Furthermore, we'd like to know if our group is on the frontier of these technologies: are others using similar tools in similar ways in classrooms or around conference tables, or are we blazing new trails?
Every so often, we'll be stealing 10-15 minutes from one of the groups to take a look at a specific tool we've been using - or, perhaps, one we've overlooked. These are: