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 still bothered to get together in person for two hours a week, and we expended effort and money bringing terrific outside guests into our classroom. So, while we met once a week in the real world, we used a lot of different tools to augment these interactions.
Our job was to occasionally step back and examine the tools we were using to see if they added to the in-person experience, detracted from it, or went beyond it. We also tried to get people to think about the audience for their sessions and for this seminar in general: if we're going to be incorprating new technology into each week's session, who were the intended beneficiaries? The students in the seminar? Other law students? The general net-connected public at large? Freida, the hat lady on Seesmic?