Probably the biggest observation to come out of this week's adventures in ETEC 648D was the big audio problem we had in SL during Wednesday night's class.
I will always tout SL's power and potential in education for use in simulations, experiential learning and as a potential DE platform, but Wednesday's episode highlights one of the major problems with SL at this point in time: as an "outsourced" solution you are at the mercy of Linden Labs network problems.
Unlike an in-house hosted system for delivering content such as a Sakai, Moodle or self-hosted instance of a tool like Elluminate or a Wimba, Linden Labs is hosted and run purely by Linden Labs so if Linden has a network problem or schedule maintenance on your parcel during your class time you are completely at their mercy and have no control whatsoever. This is in contrast to hosting your own services on your own servers in which case you still retain some control over things.
Fortunately for us, Peter is a very tech savvy individual (as you'd expect from a guy with a PhD in CIS) so we had a back-up contingency lined up and implemented very quickly. For instructors who are less tech savvy and had nothing else to fall back on I shudder to think of what a waste and frustration a night like Wednesday would have been.
I suppose Wednesday can best be summed up by the old adage of technology, "Technology makes our lives easier -- when it works."
Final post next week :)
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How true.... as I have always maintained - technology is fantastic when it works... so always have a back-up plan and a back-up plan for the back-up.....
ReplyDeleteThanks to Rebecca for getting us organized quickly. Becca & I had talked about using Elluminate or Skype as back-up plans. I think it would be useful for us to get Skype names or Skype accounts setup at the start of class as a back-up. Thankfully we have Elluminate vRooms!