Chat me up baby... Module2 Chat Task

I have been using chat for a long time but I have really found the benefits of it greatly expand for me over the past few years with it's work uses. Here is a summary of the chat tools I use often and the applications I employ with them:

• Skype is definitely the best thing since sliced bread for me. It makes my job a lot easier and certainly more flexible because I have the ability to work from home and communicate with my colleagues and boss cheaply and quickly. I do use it for personal chats with friends but not nearly as often now as I used to. The video and voice options I tend to reserve for use with family and friends because I really have no need to see my colleagues in the office and most of the time they don't have speakers, camera or microphone. I did a chat with a few folks from net11 on chat and found that we mainly had small talk. One thing I find annoying with all types of synchronous text chat is the long pauses caused by folks writing long chat messages with two finger typing.... ARRRRGH. (fortunately, this was not something I experienced with the chat I had with net11 folks)

• Facebook has a chat function which I use for catching up with friends and often e-learning colleagues as well. It is usually a ten minute quick chat. The functionality of the facebook chat is limited; I am yet to find a way to include multiple chat members; people who are offline often appear online and vice versa; messages often take a long time to come through. This article about other uses of facebook chat has given me some ideas and I guess I probably am not using it to it's full potential.

• Ning has the ability to put a chat function in it but to be honest, I think it is pretty rubbish. There doesn't seem to be any audible indication of an incoming message and chats seem to stay there for days... in hindsight I might take it away from the ning I have set up. This forum discussion on a ning website I am a part of reflects some of the problems I have experienced in the past with ning chat.

• Twitter, though not a synchronous communication chat method as such, has proved to be a very good way for me to have "chats". Though you often have to wait for a long time (maybe a whole day) the responses you get seem to be measured (usually) and thoughtful because they are public record (if you use the @reply as opposed to the DM direct message). For me the fantastic opportunity that you get with twitter which you don't with many other methods is the access to contemporaries all around the world who you otherwise would never have had access to. I have managed to have a few impromptu quick twitter chats with some of the net11 folks and these have added to the connections we have experienced in the forums.

I know these chat methods are probably not the most popular or even the most effective but they are the ones that I use and those are my reflections on them. Should I try something else? well I have used MSN, ICQ and others in the past but this is what I currently play with.I have found that the asynchronous discussions occurring in the webct forums, on blogs and other web2.0 tools to be more akin to my optimum communication style.... but I like to play with all sorts of stuff so I reckon I will be playing with another tool that is bigger and better at some stage down the track and I'll let you know how that goes too ;)

Module 2 Lists Task

As a convenient coincidence for the Email Lists Task I was asked by my boss at work to design a Christmas card and a little video for emailing out to our students, clients and associates. The image I produced is there at the left and the video was a 10 second 400kb .mov file. So when I found out that they wanted to send the file to 350 recipients from the Office Manager outlook account I started to have some concerns. 350 X 500kb equals a whole host of problems.

As we are an educational institution we have access to the fantastic resources at Edna one of which is Edna Lists. I applied for and set up an email list some time ago and it had been lying dormant ever since. So I put two and two together and the result was a nice shiny email list with 350 emails addresses in it. I have to say I am indebted to the fabulous Kerry Johnson who I am lucky enough to have in my PLN as my Edna expert. I sent out a tweet for help and she responded with her phone number!! Now that's customer service eh.

The email list software interface (is that the right terminology?) that Edna uses for their lists is Lyris and so far it has been a snap to use. At this point in time the email list will only be used for sending information emails about BJ's Australia but there is the possibility we will use it more as a two way communication tool. I really liked the analysis email I received in my inbox a few hours after we sent out the email message. It provided me with excellent information about the delivery successes and failures.

Screenshot of Edna Lists in action.

So for this task I am going to answer the questions with my experiences of today and my work use of email lists firmly in the forefront of my thoughts.

What are the pros and cons of email lists versus discussion boards?
Are there certain kinds of communication or purposes more suited to one than the other?
For our needs there is no question, a discussion board simply would not have provided the services we needed. We needed a speedy way to get the Christmas Message out. We did not need to have a bunch of folks discussing the whys and wherefores of Christmas. This was a unidirectional connection with a single short term purpose and a secondary but no less important opportunity for us to create a legacy for easy communication with our network.

Of course there are pros (here is a link to the Lyris product tour) and cons for email lists. And of course you can all find good reasons not to use Discussion Boards like this and well our course discussion board is a prime example of an extremely useful discussion board.

For me this experience has also opened up a whole new can of worms and I'm sure there will be plenty of people dead against the way I have used email lists today. There is no question however that for the BJ's , this use of email lists is exactly what we needed.